Transcending the Lazaretto

It is about bodies, in their nakedness and their ecstasy, in their turmoil of desire or in their silent withdrawal. But it is also about souls, with their delusions and reasons, with their enchantments and fears.

If the lazarettos and asylums were places for concealment and confinement, these stories challenge the borders of those cloistered universes, to show us that their realities were always on the outside, in our world, that great lazaretto hidden in itself.

Here they come to life and provide space to the disturbing vital transits of wounded beings, marked by unusual affections, in a fascinating theater of seductions and phobias, ghosts and blindness, loves and limits that with the brush of strangeness, delineate the invisible plot of human existence.

We are a face and many faces, a torrent of languages, skin colors and ages. Grieving and partying. The Wheel of Samsara. Affections, mental illnesses, fears and doubts bind us to this lazaretto. It is in the daily waking up, in the common and repeated stories that we find the blockage. The stone that impedes progress. It is the awareness of observing our own history or to intern ourselves in others that as a nosy reader we shed the light that allows us to transcend the lazaretto, to go through quarantine, rise from the dead and be among the living as Lazarus did in the biblical story. Transforming our darkness to light.