Archaic and digital meet on stage — the visuals for the traditional “concertone” of La Notte della Taranta 2024.

La Notte della Taranta is one of the largest rituals of music and dance in the world and the symbolic event of Salento's folk culture. The 2024 concertone, the twenty-seventh, directed by Maestro Concertatore Shablo, brought artists such as Angelina Mango, Gaia and Geolier to the stage before more than 150,000 people.

The edition's theme, “Generazione Taranta”, told of a generation that grew up alongside the festival, absorbed the sounds and rhythms of the pizzica and reinterprets them with contemporary aesthetics and visual languages. The same drive toward fusion guided the show's visual project, entrusted to the studio Galattico, which had already handled its artistic direction in 2022.

The work began with extensive iconographic and stylistic research, from which a hybrid imagery emerged, in constant dialogue between archaic and digital, between the memory of roots and contemporary influences.

The starting materials were heterogeneous — photographs, cut-outs, graphics, illustrations — and the challenge was to animate them in a way faithful to the spirit of traditional music, finding a visual rhythm able to hold such different elements together without flattening their differences.

Within the team I took care of the animation: I gave movement to the illustrations and built their rhythm.

For the visuals accompanying the song “L'acqua te la funtana” I combined Messapian vases and traditional Salento trozzelle with graphic shapes and motifs tied to water and propitiatory rituals. The fluid, continuous movement of the graphic motifs contrasts with the rigidity of the black-and-white photographs of the vases, creating a constant dialogue between ancient and modern, between static and dynamic.

For Angelina Mango's “La noia” I made busts and sculptures from the Greek tradition move and jump, set in an essential environment — geometric lines, flat fields of color — where the contrast between classical and minimal became the visual language of the song. Sharp cuts and repeated movements emphasize and echo the song's cadenced rhythm.

For “La pizzica di Taranto” I animated iconographic elements from distant, exotic cultures: monstrous creatures whose eyes, tongues, mouths and wings I moved to the beat of the music, creating an unexpected visual contrast that amplifies the hypnotic force of the rhythm.

The show draws on Salento's cultural heritage to build a contemporary visual language, dense with symbols and suggestions.