Santu Paulu is the name given to Saint Paul in the Apulian dialect. He is the patron saint of all those who have been bitten or pinched by venomous animals such as spiders, scorpions and snakes. In southern Italian Catholic folklore, songs are sung imploring the saint to heal those who behave ‘as if stung by an adder’.
Tarantism in southern Italy is a cultural phenomenon that was also referred to as “dancing mania” or “choreomania” by medical doctors in the Middle Ages. It mostly affected women, whose seizures and ecstasy were attributed to the bite of a poisonous spider. Healing was promised by the pizzica (from pizzicare, to pinch), originally a therapeutic tarantella dance in which those affected reacted to certain melodies, rhythms and even colours, and often had to dance for days on end until they were completely exhausted.
In the 17th century, when research into the phenomenon reached its peak, tarantism was commonly referred to as chorea imaginativa (‘imaginative dance’) or chorea lasciva (‘playful dance’) and was associated with witchcraft due to its proximity to Ancient Greek Dionysian cults. Even in the earliest sources, the tarantella was described as a dance of the enthusiastic and possessed and seen as an emotional, embodied expression of states of excitement and ecstasy (mania).
Since the 1950s, there have been numerous film, photo and audio recordings of the phenomenon. Today, tarantism, which once stigmatised those affected, has been reinterpreted and is performed publicly. Pizzica music and tarantella dances have become an important cultural and economic resource as part of the local folklore of Apulia: as a tourist spectacle, as intangible cultural heritage and, last but not least, as a strategy for coping with individual and collective crises.
The installation is based on several years of artistic-ethnographic field research by Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble, who travelled through southern Italy and conducted multimodal research in pursuit of historic and contemporary forms of tarantism. It is part of the collaborative research project TARANTISM REVISITED. [www.tarantism-revisited.net]
Credits
By Anja Dreschke & Michaela Schäuble
Camera & Photography by Anja Dreschke
Montage by Anja Dreschke & Carlo Peters
Music & Field Recordings by Carlo Peters
Archival Research by Michaela Schäuble
Translations by Paolo Miceli
Commissioned by Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, 2024
Anja Dreschke is a visual and media anthropologist, filmmaker, and curator based in Cologne. Her interests focus on the theory and practice of audiovisual media at the intersection of experimental ethnography, documentary forms and artistic research. Based on multimodal ethnography she realizes texts, films, photo essays, video installations, exhibitions, and hybrid publications. Currently, she is interim professor for media anthropology and innovative methods at the University of Siegen. In summer term 2025 she is a guest professor at the Berlin Academy of the Arts [www.anjadreschke.de]
Michaela Schäuble is professor for social anthropology with a focus on media anthropology at the University of Bern (CH), where she also co-directs EMB – Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern. Her research explores apparatuses of belief, specifically the role of embodiment, mediality and remediation based on fieldwork in south-eastern Europe and in the Mediterranean. She has published widely on iconographies of ecstasy and affliction, cultural heritage and the politics of commemoration. As a filmmaker, she works multimodally and realises films as well as video installations for exhibitions and museums (i. e. Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Zentrum Paul Klee Bern).
Together they directed the award-winning essayistic documentary film “Tarantism Revisited” (D/CH 2024)
