With Albert Giacometti’s sculptures as our recent Kick-About muse, I made some strange little figures of my own. I called them Stigmatics after their poppy-like head-shapes, and because this grouping of strange, silent characters made me think of cenobites and mystics. I’m not sure if the appearance of these guys on the shimmering horizon augurs good news or bad, only that something needs to be done about something and these are the ones to do it.
And given that the Stigmatics have strange and mysterious ways, I imagined one of their rituals. Taranto comes from tarantism, a folk belief and ritual complex in southern Italy, in which a person was believed to have been bitten or possessed by the tarantula. The ‘cure’ was music and intense dancing, sometimes frantic, convulsive, circular, or trance-like. Not 100% sure why these ideas came together as they did, but I made a short film to evoke the stigmatics doing their important, ritualistic thing in the heat haze of some distant land.
Taranto
Red's Kingdom 
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