Talking about death is not easy, but it is necessary. Especially when death knocks on your door, as happened to the Sguazzi Odv Association which lost its founding member Alex Caltagirone on Christmas night 2023. To talk about death, the idea of creating a Festival was born, which addresses the theme through different languages and registers. «We saw Alex get ill – says Enrico Colpani, president of Sguazzi Odv – and get worse day after day, until we reached this conclusion which came too quickly for him and for us. We felt the need to find a way to grieve this loss. And at the same time, in this historical moment, we needed to relaunch our organization which is about to turn twenty and which has lost one of the people who was its glue. Covid has slowed down people’s participation and the Third Sector has also paid the price. Added to this is the difficulty in generational change. And so we thought of something sufficiently challenging, which could involve and excite everyone.”
Taking care of relationships
Sguazzi is a voluntary organization active since 2005 that is dedicated to building social and cultural actions that take care of relationships between people, regardless of their physical, mental and social living conditions. From these events and these reflections, Funesto, the Sguazzi Odv Festival, took shape, which puts the theme of death at the center of a cultural and artistic proposal that helps to investigate it from multiple points of view.
«With some of his projects, Sguazzi has long reflected on the themes of health, care, personal well-being, fragility – explains Massimo Malanchini, volunteer member of Sguazzi and creative director of the Festival – and in our opinion behind all these words there is also the theme of death. We felt that the time had come to create a cultural proposal and this seemed to us to be the most interesting theme, not only for us as an association but also for the historical, civil and cultural context that we live in today”.
Scheduled events
The Festival will focus mainly on the month of November 2024 and the complete program will be available shortly on the funesto.sguazzi.org website; but as early as next week and until the month of July, some anticipatory events are planned to bring the public closer to the theme. «Being this is its first edition and a particular proposal, we felt the need to leave some small clues about the Festival – continues Malanchini -. The pre-Festival events will gradually bring us closer to the theme of death and will be a bit special: we will start by talking about death with the children in a delicate way, then we will take the opportunity of the anniversary of Matteotti’s death to talk about an illustrious death, and in July we will be in Clusone to retrace death through art with a focus on macabre dances.”
We begin in Cologno al Serio, home of one of the Association’s historic projects, on May 28th, continuing in Bergamo on May 30th and 31st and arriving in Clusone on July 7th waiting for the autumn program to be revealed. All information relating to these first events is already available on the Festival’s website.
«It is an uncomfortable topic but we want to face it with courage, not to be intimidated: it is not just a provocation, but a challenge. It is not intended to be a sad and macabre proposal. He will address the topic of death with respect, seriousness, competence but also with irony and originality”
For all age groups
The program, right from its first events, is full of proposals for all age groups, designed both to arouse emotions and to open up profound reflections. For this reason, the languages used will be the most diverse: from bioethics to medicine, from spirituality to philosophy, from law to figurative arts, passing through theater and animated cinema. All united under one name: Funesto. «We chose a title – concludes Malanchini – which is evidently a bit uncomfortable. On the one hand to convey the discomfort of the topic, on the other to show ourselves rather courageous right from the start. It is an uncomfortable topic but we want to face it with courage, not to be intimidated: it is not just a provocation, but a challenge. It is not intended to be a sad and macabre proposal. He will address the topic of death with respect, seriousness, competence but also with irony and originality.”
