Machina Sacra

2026 – Ongoing

Machina Sacra is a participatory performance and installation that reinterprets one of Southern Italy's oldest collective rituals through the visual language of contemporary technology. A community procession carries a large luminous screen instead of a religious statue. Participants walk holding illuminated smartphones mounted on wooden staffs, while a liturgy generated in dialogue with artificial intelligence unfolds through their devices. At the beginning of the action, the screen is physically cut with a grinder, transforming the display into a symbolic threshold where light emerges through fracture rather than representation. The work does not parody religious tradition. Instead, it adopts its symbolic structure to investigate the shifting forms of belief, trust and collective parti