By Giovanni Attili & Giorgio Agamben

The history of Civita di Bagnoregio throbs in the relentless movement of change and metamorphosis. Such is the nature of this wounded territory: collapse and reconstruction, abandonment and repopulation, vital links that are broken and new relationships that are interwoven with one another. Whenever defeat has seemed inevitable, the hamlet has always breathed anew. A new ability to inhabit. Civita is thus a place where time is circular: a time when death foreshadows a periodical re-establishment of the pre-existing. It is this cyclical conception that allows Civita’s land to signify death. To be its travel companion. After all, Civita’s history has always been that of a place capable of transforming death into a living place. But history is familiar with sudden lacerations. Now that commodification has engulfed every aspect of life in the hamlet, death has divested itself of its sacred nature and been reduced to a spectacularized icon. In this new and tragic frontier of the irremediable, Civita has expelled life and its capacity for regeneration. That living that was at one time firmly connected to the land is coming apart in the absence of actions that can cast ahead and into the future what exists.