Composed, recorded, mixed and mastered by SEC_ between 2014 and 2015. Voice by M.DellaMorte. Words from Peter Liechti’s film “The Sound of Insects”, inspired by M. Shimada’s book “Diary of a mummy”. Premiered in Napoli as a live multichannel diffusion for several radios and speakers, with live voice. Thanks to Stefano Perna for radio broadcast technology and to M.DellaMorte for inspiring the concept.
Mefite is an Italic Goddess venerated in central and southern Italy, especially in the Irpinia Region. Goddess of fertility, she presides over the passage from life to death. Tremendous Goddess who has her cult-place located in the Ansanto Valley, the mortal moat, where horrible gas emissions coming out from a cave, carried by the wind, kill who goes too close.
A mortal air that governs the complex articulation of this cult: to ingratiate the Goddess it is forbidden to come too close to her, because you could die; to go through the Netherworld, instead, the same caution is requested, because the Death could enter the lungs before the way through is reached.
Through the words of “Diary of a mummy”, that already inspired the dearly departed film maker Peter Liechti, it was possible to approach this mysterious and unsettling subject. Here the passage between “this and the other world” is described almost literally, through the detailed diary of a death by starvation. A kind of suspension in the middle of the two, where death hits without a single touch, but, in doing it, gives also the opposite of what desired: nightmares instead of peace, pain instead of relief. A challenge that invites to move forward, towards the unfathomable zone that divides Life and Death.