Mantèion

Capo Vaticano, Tropea, October 2000

A performance in honour of the prophetess Manto, sculpted forever by the sea wind on the rocks of the Cape of Prophecies

Photos by anTheòs

A work in synergy with the poem of the same title published in the book UNIVERSI.

Some of Teri’s poems act as a counterpoint to her paintings or performances. Heightening feeling and vision nonetheless leaves the different modes of expression independent of one another: the poems are not meant to describe the other works, nor are the latter meant to illustrate the former. What matters is the balance, the happy union that is created, the synergy that arises, in that attempt to achieve the harmony and beauty at the heart of all Teri’s research.

The Symbolic Action is dedicated to Manto, the mysterious prophetess.

She is closely linked to Capo Vaticano, the rocky promontory in Calabria a few kilometres from Tropea, whose name comes from vaticinium – that is, prophecy, but also vates, poet as well as oracle – and expresses beauty, mystery and divin/ation, as does the place itself.

Capo Vaticano is a sacred and poetic place…

In mythical times the prophetess dwelt there, and she still marks it with her presence, with her stone profile forever outlined at the foot of the promontory. The point from which it can be seen most clearly – unchanging yet constantly changing with the light and the reflections of the water – is the beach of Santa Maria di Ricadi.

Manto, it is said, came from Thebes, daughter of the seer Tiresias, the blind man with extraordinary powers of divination.

She had inherited from her father the ability to foretell events.

The name of the city of Mantua, Virgil’s city, is said to derive from her; but what matters most is Manto’s assimilation with the Cumaean Sibyl: one of those involuntary seers, formerly ancestral deities transformed by later culture and by the religiosity of the classical age, but still effective as a link between humans and otherworldly powers…