Originate and Recompile

2020

5min

In 1962 Ernesto De Martino travelled to the South of Italy for his ethnographic research and shot "La Taranta". A study around women who were poisoned by a Trantula bite while harvesting in the fields. The remedy against the deadly poison was a folk dance called Taranta. The women danced the poison out of their bodies with the help of local musicians and priests. Studies around this phenomenon have highlighted that, in the majority of cases, these women were suffering severe mental illness and hysteria due to sexual abuse and poverty. In present-day Italy a similar dynamic has resurfaced, uncovering the stories of groups of immigrant women (mostly from Romania) who were victims of agricultural and sexual exploitation in Ragusa, Sicly. I reapprorpiated the 1962 archival footage to propose a different angle of the story surrounding these women. Not from the point of view of a man who has undertaken to observe them, but from the point of view of a woman from the South of Italy. (FF)