Sota Terra

The production

After the great adventure of the mine, and what the mine has brought to this territory, we wondered what our people should do…? This is my fiftieth year underground, so for fifty years, my life has been between the light and the darkness of the caves – says the speleologist Ubaldo Sanna, the son of a mining family from Sardinia, as we enter the cave of Su Mannau, where he has been practicing speleology since 1973. 

What is the relationship between people and the underground? The underground is inaccessible, inhospitable, dark, and damp. It is a place where we bury what we want to hide, where we imagine legends of monstrous beings, and where we fear getting trapped. At the same time, it is also where we find the most precious minerals for humanity, where we bury our loved ones, or where we find part of our history. “Below ground, we put what we fear and want to abandon, and what we love and want to preserve” (MacFarlane, 2019). 

Sota Terra is a performance created between Mataró (Catalonia) and Cagliari (Sardinia) which, during its creation process, collaborated with two choirs to explore the relationship that humans have with the underground and the planet. Our daily lives make us walk quickly and keep looking ahead , but what happens if we change our perspective and look downward? We will discover a planet that moves at geological time, and its history is difficult for humanity to grasp. Our lives are summarized in a centimeter of stalactite. 

We invite you to become cyborg explorers, equipped with headlamps and cybernetic bracelets (which vibrate when the planet has seismic activity), and leave the surface to slip down beneath the earth.

More details

Director: Moon Ribas and Quim Girón 
Directorial Support: Joan Cot Ros 
Performers: Quim Girón and Moon Ribas 
Music and Lighting Design: Joan Cot Ros 
Video Editing: Nacho Montenegro 
Electronic Engineer: Jose Luis Salmerón 
Voiceover: Ubaldo Sanna 
Community Mediation: Concha Millà (Mataró) and Daniele Zeda (Cagliari) 
Collaborating Communities: Primavera per la Pau Choir (Mataró) and Associazione Studium Canticum (Cagliari) Residence Spaces: Can Gassol (Mataró, Catalonia), Sa Manifattura (Cagliari, Sardinia) 
Co-producers: Transversal Consortium, Network of Cultural Activities, and Teatro di Sardegna Organization: Stronger Peripheries, a project co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union. Administrative production: Associació cultural Elclimamola 

Acknowledgments: Ubaldo Sanna (Speleologist), Joan Sala (Geologist), Assumpta Triadó (Speleologist), Carmen Puerta (Archaeologist), Francesca Serra (Speleologist), Ermanno Pusceddu (Speleologist), Pierluigi Melis (Speleologist), Nicola Sitzia (Speleologist), Alberto Piras (Speleologist),Gruppo speleo archeologico Giovanni Spano and Visualsonora SCL (Pau Manté and Hèlia Manté), Cave of su Mannau.