On Saturday, 12 October 2024, on the occasion of the 20^th Day of the Contemporary, Ex Elettrofonica will inaugurate LUCTUS – A consciousness cHoral soul, a performative installation and exhibit featuring Sergio Racanati, curated by Gianluca Brogna.

The site-specific installation LUCTUS – A consciousness cHoral soul fits into the research the artist has pursued for several years on rituals, with a look at the mechanisms that facilitate processes of self-healing. With this perspective, Sergio Racanati reflects on the issues of social, political, environmental, and ethical urgency that humankind is facing worldwide.

The gallery’s central room features a sound and olfactory performance action, designed to create a state of perceptual suspension and permanent instability, to showcase pain. The physical, astral, metaphysical body in the dimension of collective pain, with the body understood as a material and immaterial ecosystem in its aspect of loss, of mourning. Within the installation, viewers are called to let their own experience resonate with collective history. It is a reconsideration of the possibility of bringing spiritual wellness to a humankind that is plagued by pain, violence, abuse, deprivation, and oppression.

The olfactory element is provided by Omani frankincense, rare and very precious, from the Boswellia sacra tree, also known as olibanum, from the Arabic al-lubàn. Boswellia sacra grows in southern Oman and produces incense of the highest quality. The resin burns inside a censer, a work created by the artist that is both medium and performance.

The narrative dimension is completely entrusted to sound: a succession of ambient, tekno, dark, progressive, and minimal sounds give shape to a mutant, hybrid, and spurious transcription of the acoustic experience. Racanati’s sound process goes through evolutions and collapses, tears and snags, in an attempt to deconstruct the useless dynamics of time to bring to light a mantra, a sound where one can get lost and find oneself again. The artist says: “I hope it is a collective trance where we find the energy for a new palingenesis.”

In the room adjacent to the Gallery’s main hall, there will be a film in colour titled DEBRIS/DETRITI_Oman, created in November 2023, as part of the artist’s research on the World’s SOUTHs. In it, the artist uses an almost ethnographic lens to observe liminal territories and community attitudes, performing visceral crossings, as he himself defines them.

Accompanying the film is a series of photographs taken in Ras Al Hadd, a village about 60 km from the city of Sur, capital of the region Ash Sharqiyah. This place and its beach, now a natural reserve, have hosted human settlements since the third millennium BCE, representing an important refuge not only for ships in bad weather, but also for airplanes during World War II. Green turtles come to the Ras Al Jinz beach every year to lay their eggs.