Cohabiting with Death
In 1986, Siouxsie and The Banshees sang of ancient civilizations “choking on the dirt and sand,” as their former glories were “dragged and washed with eager hands.” Today, Taranto lives in constant dialogue with death. Here, mortality is not an end—it is an ongoing state. Unlike in the song, where destruction is wrought by nature, in Taranto it is the result of human hands. Life doesn’t conclude; it fades before forming, suffocated by toxicity, asbestos, and the looming specter of the ILVA steel plant. The air carries industrial ghosts: fine, invisible particles that infiltrate lungs and erode bodies from within. Absence saturates the atmosphere, heavy with suspended breaths. It is from this erosion, this landscape of loss, that Lorenzo Montinaro shapes Spirito Sangue.
Your City Lies in Dust, My Friend
Montinaro returns to Taranto not as a native, but as an exile walking haunted ground. Spirito Sangue is not a homecoming—it is an unearthing. He excavates corpses both literal and symbolic, remnants that once resisted time’s slow abrasion. But in Taranto, time distorts. Illness stretches it, transforming days into centuries, into a drawn-out wait for a death that never leaves. Montinaro does not simply document decay; he digs into it. From the cavities he opens, he builds not tombs but monuments, structures that refuse disappearance, that stand against the vanishing brought by erosion, indifference, and time. From the dust, he outlines an archaeology of loss. A memory not based on endurance, but on the fragile insistence of what refuses to be forgotten.
