The Last Lamentation exhibition opens on March 28 at the MAN Museum in Nuoro , the pinnacle of Valentina Medda 's artistic project, curated by Maria Paola Zedda, created thanks to the support of the Italian Council (XI edition, 2022), an international promotion program of Italian art of the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, the result of a co-production that branches out from Sardinia to Belgium, New York and Slovenia and which is led by ZEIT, together with the MAN Museum of Nuoro, Sardegna Teatro, Flux Factory (NYC), and VierNulVier (Belgium).

The Last Lamentation is a funeral ritual for the Mediterranean, observed by the artist as a place of waiting, suspension and passing, embodiment of an absence - a deposit of bodies and the body in itself. Valentina Medda crosses it in the evocation of a rite widespread throughout the area overlooking its coasts: ritual crying, investigated at the end of the 1950s by the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, now almost extinct in Southern Italy, but alive on the southern and eastern coasts from Lebanon to Morocco.

The exhibition revolves around the video work of the same name The Last Lamentation , produced between 2023 and 2024, destined for the collections of the MAMbo - Museum of Modern Art of Bologna: a work shot in Sardinia and created through a research process in the territory , which tells the tragedy of the sea through a hypnotic choreographic, vocal and sound score. The work reworks ritual codes in contemporary and abstract forms thanks to the collaboration with Gaspare Sammartano, composer, Claudia Ciceroni, composer and vocal trainer, Attila Faravelli, for aspects related to field recording. Here the relationship between body, pathos, landscape is stratified by systems of absence and presence through the participation of a choir of 12 women dressed in black, standing next to the sea, an element which by contrast makes the silent presence of the dead more tangible and makes explode their voices.