REQUIEM, NURAGHE PISCU, SARDINIA 
in collaboration with photographer Domenico Cortese

Site-specific ritual performance

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My first steps on Sardinian land carried me upward—toward the ancient stones of Nuraghe Piscu and a horizon that felt both distant and intimately known. I arrived as the Shadow Bird, drawn by a gravitational pull older than language. The nuraghe, a prehistoric stone tower rising from the earth like a vertebra of collective memory, became a threshold: an architecture of passage between the everyday and the sacred.

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Entering the structure was an act of descent as much as ascent. Each stone guided me inward—into the dark, womb-like chamber associated with the dea madre, the mother goddess, and the ancestral dead who linger in Sardinia’s subterranean imagination. The ritual unfolded as a listening practice: to stone, to breath, to the echo of grief held in the land itself. Movement slowed, gestures pared down, allowing the body to become a vessel for remembrance rather than representation.

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Midway through the offering, a second grief opened. On the same day, far away, a memorial was being held for a childhood friend whose ceremony I could not attend. Distance collapsed; time folded. The ritual at Nuraghe Piscu became a shared site of mourning, where personal loss met ancestral memory. These remembrances merged into a single gesture—an offering to the seen and unseen, the named and the ancestral—part of an ongoing inquiry into how ancient sites can hold contemporary grief, and how ritual may reopen pathways for mourning sealed by modern life.

Photographs by Domenico Cortese (@sardinianphotographer) trace this quiet collaboration between body, stone, and horizon.