KILL THE COVID!
A HORROR/RURAL SAGA BY ALESSANDRO BAVARI AND SARA ALISCIONI
>>IN ITALIAN AND ENGLISH VERSION<<
\THE BOOK\
Narrative and photographic mockumentary.
120 pages for over 250 images.
Price 50 euros plus shipping costs.
First limited edition of 500 copies, each copy is numbered and signed by the authors.
For reservations and information contact me privately.
The project KILL THE COVID!, set in Italy in the Marche region, to Bura, one of the heterogeneous countryside districts, was born from the idea of Alessandro Bavari and Sara Aliscioni. Photographers by profession and by artistic choice, Alessandro together with Sara, tell us, through images and texts, an entirely rural saga of killing Covid, invisible to the human eye but tangible in this work.
The Covid-19, world famous number one enemy, now represented as an anthropomorphic monster with animalistic behaviors, as a mythological creature belonging to unknown countries, described with a grotesque, ridiculous and clumsy appearance unable to defend itself from it’s own hunters.
At the gates of the city of Tolentino, the villagers have absorbed the local’s popular legends narrated from generation to generation: many of these stories arise from oral traditions and historical memory of the dialect. Inherited from the tales of the elders, belonging to previous generations, the legendary trace the imaginary of the inhabitants of a century ago or, rather, those fantasies on the edge of reality.
The vehemence of popular culture combined with the collective imagination and the narrative skeleton, gives the volume a chimerical imprint made even more atavistic by photographic images.
Get accustomed to the tales of witches, werewolf, sounding pots, mysterious figures wandering in abandoned houses, lit bonfires, evil eyes and hexes, silhouettes appearing in the night near the Devil’s bridge, fearless, merciless autochthonous confront, fight capture, mistreat, mock and kill the Covid by showing the trophy and what remains of its limbs.
A sort of secret movement fighting to defeat the new monster with what you have: hoes, shovels, pitchforks, sticks, chainsaws, axes, punches and kicks.
We cannot fail to also consider the history of the people from Marche which originates far from the Piceni, or warriors people from Middle Italy: “Their name picus derives from the animal sacred to the divinity Mars, the woodpecker. This bird, in fact, under his guidance, indicated the path to the founders of the Piceno people who arrived in the Marche starting from Sabina”.
New forged warriors face the enemy, espouse the cause, and devote themselves to practice by proudly displaying their trophy.
THE POPULAR SAGA OF 19 SHOTS
A story with a harsh, rough, grotesque and rural artistic solution, Kill the Covid! wants to represent the defeat of the virus at the hands of the inhabitants of the Bura, therefore in metaphorical terms at the hands of man.
Nineteen photographic representations like the namesake of the virus, in 19 different guises.
This collection is placed in the mysterious dimension of local legends made of stories, of perceptions outside the real and ordinary conception, of monstrous apparitions such as Covid.
The events of usual life transformed by the imagination of the locals, have given life over the centuries to mythological stories shaped by the hands of the same. Jealously preserved in their memories, these have been returned amalgamated with the imagination induced by the unconscious.
In the Marche plot of evil eyes, hexes and sorcerers, witches and ghosts, the written texts, together with the visual and photographic narration, refer at the same time, to the ancient and the modern in an intense and rural setting characterized by the countryside of the district, the fields of sunflowers, woods, and the old farmhouses surrounded by the countryside courtyard.
Those who remain are the custodians of those magical formulas, handed down from generation to generation, capable of exorcising every curse.
Collectively accepted, beliefs in the power of rituals and words that evoke something or someone made it possible for the virus to materialize into a visible and tangible monster.
However, the alchemy between what has been remembered and what has been decoded has given shape to a macroscopic archetype of Covid with both human and animal features, with a grotesque and clumsy appearance, whose only gift is a congenital and obstinate stupidity.
A saga that tells the inhabitants’ revenge, persecuted for a long time by legendary figures, invisible but present in their minds, recalled by the holders of memories where the monster is now tangible, hunted and killed.
Quel ch’s’fa d’nott, s’arsa de giorn.
“What was done at night you know during the day” which is why the inhabitants hunt, capture, shoot down, kill, retrieve and display the trophy at night, in the light of the flash and the full moon.
WHY KILL THE COVID
The project was born during the contingency of Covid, the virus of the same name that has affected the whole world without distinction. The two authors, adopting a sarcastic key, through their visionary creativity, return to the public the representation of evil, in an unreal, imaginative, grotesque, crude and cynical guise with the aim of exorcising it.
KILL THE COVID!, with its ineluctable, biting and sarcastic story and its photographic vision, also has the ambition to give a warning so that man understands the importance of maintaining the balance of nature which, in its sovereignty, takes back what belongs even without mercy. Man can be cruel but nature can be more so.
It is therefore necessary to start afresh from the system, from its management and from responsible behavior towards a fair, sustainable future, respectful of nature, animals and man.
The people of the Marches, with their vocation for the territory and the preservation of traditions, represent an example and this place is the perfect setting chosen by the authors.