Apulia, 1959: Women in white dresses dance ecstatically in a small chapel. They jump around, spin in circles, roll on the ground, some even climb the altar. They are said to have been bitten by a poisonous spider. Images of this ›dancing mania‹, which requires a ritual exorcism with music, have inspired Italian anthropologists to travel to southern Italy. Equipped with tape recorders, film and photo cameras, they tracked down the phenomenon known as tarantism. Film follows the extensive archival traces of these research trips and visits the places and landscapes of their origins. This cinematic quest is framed by the unique correspondence between the anthropologist Annabella Rossi and Michela Margiotta alias Anna, a ‘tarantata’.
By interweaving images and voices from the past with the present, the film questions the complex history and diverse forms in which tarantism lives on today. The film is part of the media ethnographic research project “Taranrism Revised”.
Anja Dreschke
Anja Dreschke is a visual and media anthropologist, filmmaker, and curator based in Cologne/Germany. Her research interests and publications focus on the theory and practice of audiovisual media at the intersection of experimental ethnography, essayistic film and artistic research. Based on multimodal ethnography, she realizes texts, films, photo essays, video installations, exhibitions and hybrid publications. She teaches at universities, film schools and art academies and works as curator for film festivals, museums, and other cultural institutions. In 2018 she was a fellow at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln and from 2019 to 2021 she was part of the selection committee of the Duisburger Filmwoche. Currently, she is an Interim Professor for Media Anthropology and Innovative Methods at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Siegen. In summer term 2025 is a guest professor for media theory and time-based media at the Berlin Academy of the Arts.
Michaela Schäuble
Michaela Schäuble is professor for social anthropology with a focus on media anthropology at the University of Bern (CH) where she also co-directs EMB-Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern. As a filmmaker and anthropologist her work combines ethnographic research with experimental essayistic film formats. She explores apparatuses of belief, specifically the role of embodiment and the senses, mediality and remediation in contexts of religious practice and experience. In recent years a central focus of her work has been on ecological perception and the question of what it means to deal with regimes of in/visibility and the marginalization of subaltern voices, grounded in fieldwork in Southeast Europe and the Mediterranean. Her films and installations have been screened at multiple film festivals including the HotDocs Filmfestival in Toronto, Duisburger Filmwoche, Worldfilm Festival of Visual Culture in Tartu, GIEFF, and other venues such as Grassi Museum, Schwules Museum Berlin, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, and Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.