Un appuntamento nascosto fra l’arcaico e il contemporaneo. Mamoiada: voci di pastori

A secret appointment between the archaic and the contemporary. Shepherds’
voices in Mamoiada. The essay tries to represent, in a narrative form, the
testimonies of some shepherds in Mamoiada, a small town in Sardinia. Through their
voices it intends to highlight how, despite the modernisation process , which took
place on the island in the last fifty years, has led to a breakdown in the relationship
that held together man, society and nature, in the recent years small but significant
signs show that, albeit still in stammering forms, a new rapprochement of man to
earth is in progress. This is not a kind of resurrection, “nor the advent of a great
light on all the lights” (Didi-Huberman 2010, 33), but rather fragile signals showing
that, even often maybe, “destructions apparently total are never absolute” (ibid.).
And that luckily sometimes, away from the show and the limelight, even when in
the dark or under the spotlight we can no longer see them, fragile, intermittent
and fleeting glimpses survive “in which memory and hope exchange their signals to
each other” (ibid., 48) to illuminate the slopes of possible futures. Fireflies, glows flashing
some light in the darkness of our present.