Eva Coviello

Growing up in Bitonto, southern Italy, the rhythm of Catholic life structured time and space: Sunday Mass, catechism, the oratory, processions that periodically activated the streets, domestic altars that extended the church into houses. 

Among all the rituals that shape Bitonto, the procession of the Santi Medici exceeds the boundaries of liturgy and becomes a collective occupation of the city, drawing pilgrims from across the region and beyond. It is also the ritual that, more than others, revealed to me a dissonance I only later understood as both spatial and historical: a distance between the way younger generations relate to the sacred today and the way the space of the church continues to organize that relationship. 

The Santi Medici were Syrian brothers who healed without asking for payment. Their sanctity was embodied in a physical gesture of care: the hand that touches, the body that bends toward another body in pain. In my region, the earliest cult surrounding them was informal and non-hierarchical, lived in caves along a river. 

Over centuries, that tradition was gradually absorbed into ecclesiastical structure. The relics were relocated, a church was built, the rituals were codified. The Basilica dei Santi Medici imposes its own spatial logic: it directs bodies, fixes attention, assigns position through frontality, elevation, and the distribution of light and volume. The body, once the subject of the rite, became its instrument. 

The installation works with wax because wax was always already there, in the hands of the procession. The figures are made of fabric hardened in wax, each frozen in a posture taken from the procession, placed on the same level: carrying, holding, watching, leaning, waiting. 

I recognize the value of these rituals. They shaped me, and they continue to hold a community together. But they no longer reflect the needs of the younger generation that still shows up, without finding itself in the space that hosts it.