Trame di Luna
Filignano

13 August 2025

About Trame di Luna, words by Tracy MacKenna
“Trame di Luna is the name of the new cultural festival that took place on 13 August 2025, in our community of Filignano.

The Italian word ‘trame’ can mean framework, plot, or story and also the horizontal ‘weft’ threads in woven fabric. ‘Luna’ is of course ‘moon’.

The festival was initiated and supported by the Municipality of Filignano, and was lead by Councillor Pierluigi Iannarelli who is a Digital Artist / UI/UX Designer.

A programme of exhibitions and workshops, a guided walk and a concert brought together works by artists and designers from the region of Molise. A new presentation titled ‘The Story of Migration’ showed this important part of Filignano’s history using carefully selected archival photographs from the local collection ‘The Museum for the Memory of the Territory’ that has been established by its Keeper, Eugenio Verrecchia. The Mario Lanza Museum’s collection includes the operatic tenor and Hollywood star’s costumes, LP records, documentary photographs and memorabilia relating to his public performances. Lanza’s family is from Collemacchia, and their home was on the site now occupied by one of The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s work-live residency buildings.

I was delighted to be invited to help plan and realise the festival, and to curate a programme of video works. The artists that I in turn invited from around the world have each been in residence with The Museum of Loss and Renewal, in Collemacchia (Italy) and/or in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. Their video works investigate and present ideas about ‘place’, with a focus on human and more-than-human aspects and relationships. The ideas for many of the works shown started while the artists were in residence and share with inhabitants fascinating perspectives on each place that situate the local within global issues.”

Exhibition, The Museum for the Memory of the Territory

Guided walk from Filignano to Piricocco to Bottazella

I was delighted to have an excerpt of Sugo screened in Filignano as part of the Trame di Luna this summer.

It’s always interesting to find ways to show work again, especially film work, as the piece exists as an active thing - it is not inherently an object that a sole person can purchase and keep. With this in mind, I am interested in opportunities to display films that I have made and consider what this means for the existence of the work itself. The opportunity to share an excerpt of Sugo came about through a conversation with Tracy, from the Museum of Loss and Renewal.
I have undertaken a couple of residencies with the Museum, which you can find out more about here.

Sugo is an artist film I made, which explores the personal, intimate ways love and care are expressed through food. It considers how the meaning of preparing and sharing meals shifts as relationships grow, focusing on memory and the preservation of the ineffable, like the care in a meal made by someone you love.

Scrambling to capture the meaning embedded in the act of passing down recipes. Its soft, stuttering sequences, its immersive, swaddling score, aim to articulate the impossibility of capturing moments of a life, fully knowing a person, and preserving the care and love inscribed in every one of their gestures.
The screening offered an opportunity to create an excerpt of the film. I wanted to select a moment that provided context while still holding onto the unknowns and uncertainties that shape the film as a whole. Throughout the work, a text runs alongside the images, developed with the generous support of Enxhi Mandija. I chose as the excerpt a passage where a pivotal shift occurs within this text.

The writing speaks to a “creature of care,” understood as something alive—formed by, and sustained within, the dynamics of relationships. In the excerpted section, the address moves from the creature to “you,” a direct reference to my nonna, who is at the heart of the film. This shift carries with it the underlying reason for the creature’s existence: without one, the other does not exist. The text builds this idea through deliberate word choices and a purposeful vagueness, allowing it to be read at once as a message to the creature and my nonna. This continues until the moment when the line appears: “I need you to know that I notice these unseen acts.”

In preparing the excerpt for screening, I was grateful to work once more with Enxhi as she translated the text into Italian. Together, we considered how best to preserve its tone and ambiguity, which a literal translation could not fully capture. The final translated text was printed and shared during the festival, accompanying the film.