Alessandro Toscano

Una Processione Mistica is a short documentary produced for
MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo.

Alessandro Toscano followed for several months artist Valentina Vannicola during the production of La Processione Mistica, a video-photographic reinterpretation of the XXIXth Canto of Dante's Purgatorio.
The documentary traces the complex genesis of this community work for the realization of which the artist involved the inhabitants of her home town, Tolfa in the Maremma Laziale, in all its phases.

Valentina Vannicola's entire artistic practice is a methodical staging process that from the ideation to the realization phase is developed through an intense dialogue with the territories in which the artist decides or is called to work. This practice, which comes very close to that of cinema, finds common roots in those of contemporary art, relational and participatory art, in literature as in the history of Italian cinema precisely. Neorealism, magic realism as well as Pasolinian heretical empiricism, find traces in the works of this artist who in a completely original way catapults us simultaneously into Dante's literature and the earthly landscape of rural Italy.

The documentary La Processione Mistica offers us a glimpse not only of contemporary developments in art and photography, but also gives us a chance to rediscover the fascination and connection we can have with one of the many small communities that still animate and somehow resist the crumbling relationship between people, man and nature, identity and territory.