colei che attende [2022]

Colei che attende [She who waits] is the second in the Mothers|Lands Series by dance filmmaker Scotty Hardwig, co-created and performed by Susanna Recchia. Shot on location in the area of Marsica and Fucino Basin in Abruzzo, Italy, the film follows a lone woman and her basket of tools on a journey from a cave to a mountaintop watchtower, dancing her way across the landscapes of the Apennine mountains along the axis of time and myth.

The Mothers|Lands Series is a collection of dance-for-camera works that document movement artists relating to the non-human world and cultural imaginations of their native landscapes, where both human and land are treated as subjects that speak as equals. Through an improvised hybridity of cinematic and embodied art, these works explore the felt expression of nativity, homeland, and language at the crossroads of ecology, geology and culture. In 1983, Swiss philosopher Andre Corboz writes that landscape is “the palimpsest of time,” a canvas upon which human and non-human histories alike are written. Like bodies, landscapes are processes: subject to changes in time through “spontaneous transformation” (like erosion, flooding, glacial or volcanic activity) and “human activity” (like the building of roads, dams, bridges, farms or cities). He writes of landscapes as existing simultaneously as objective, quantifiable forms (which can be measured, known, cultivated and exploited) and as culturally perceived phantasms: “nature is that which the culture designates to be such.” But with what voice does a place speak for itself, in humming-slow tones as we tiny primates dance across its palimpsest of scarred and wrinkled skin? And where, and when, is the “sacred time and space” to listen?

a film by: Scotty Hardwig

co-created and performed by: Susanna Recchia

geographer and b-cam: Michael Ryba

music: Scotty Hardwig: “She Who Waits” ; Monplaisir: “Ce flou entres nous,” “Ne laissons rien trainer, ni limes, ni ficelles,” “The Rise, The Walk, The Hope,” “Garage,” “Action” ; Anonymous Choir: “Unus Ex Discipulis Meis” by Tomás Luis de Victoria

text: excerpt from Punicae by Silius Italicus (Libro VIII, 495-501)

with support from

la famiglia recchia

andrea olsen

The Center for European Union, Transatlantic, and
Trans-European Space Studies at Virginia Tech

THe Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment (ISCE) at Virginia tech

Filmed in the Marsica Region and Fucino Basin of Abruzzo, Italy