Malo Vento III is a ritualistic process aimed to explore illness through the lens of Italian magic -specifically that of Lucania, historical region of Southern Italy. Because every pathological condition is reduced to feeling dominated by external forces (feeling bound), untying -conceptually and physically- comes to equal healing, freeing the body and the mind from that bond.

In “Magic: A Theory from the South” (1959), the Italian ethnographer Ernesto De Martino describes a specific case of domination that manifests itself “with an actual binding, carried out with material ropes and knots that immobilize the body. In the simplest case, the binding is in fact self-tying, which in the oneiric consciousness is completely merged in the representative contents of the consciousness itself (1)”.



Throughout the performance, as the elements restrict the body, the mind detaches from the it, inducing a trance-like state that to identify the movements required for the liberation. Only when the body is freed and the knots are undone (unbinding), the individual presence -or conscious self- can be reintegrated into the physical body. This process brings into light the multidimensionality of patholoigcal conditions, stretching their existance in between the physical and the psychic. 


^{1. Ernesto, De Martino, Magic: A Theory from the South (HAU - Classics in Ethnographic Theory, 1959). Kindle edition, 66.}