Renato Fiorito – Sacro Sangue

In Verbicaro, in the deep South of Italy, the night between Thursday and the Good Friday, once a year a group of about ten men aged between 18 and 50 performs an extremely cruel ritual: they run across the village for three times, stopping only in front of the Virgin Mary’s pictures encountered during the path, scourging on their legs with the Cardidd (a large cork stopper with pieces of glass inside) in order to offer their blood.
No one knows why they do this, maybe to ask for a grace, to complete a vote, for rage, for sacrifice, for love, for a great and (seen from outside) unnatural passion. Each of them is motivated by very personal and absolutely secret motives.
During the ritual they seem fallen in trance; they don’t matter to those who are with or around them, they don’t mind the faithful praying to their passage or the thousands of blinking flashes while causing deep and sometimes even disabling injuries to the legs; at that moment there’s only their prayer, their sacral sense of blood.

The work is exclusively made of field recordings and a massive use of effects.

The original sounds were recorded at:
– Verbicaro (CS), from april 3rd to april 5th, 2012
– Naples, between 2013 and 2017
– Procida (NA), summer 2013 and 2014
– Marrakech, from december 23rd to december 26th, 2013

Limited Edition 50 copies + Postcard

Artwork, photography / Jack D’Amico
Handwritten lines, notes, titles / Walter Forestiere