The project shows an excerpt from the celebrations in Messina for the "Holy Mary of the Letter" on the 3rd of June. The statue of the Holy Mary of the Letter is brought in procession every year on the same day. According to tradition, Saint Paul came to Messina to preach and the trip was so successful that some Messinese asked to accompany him to meet the Virgin Mary. The delegation traveled with a letter from converted citizens requesting Mary's protection. Mary responded with her own letter in Hebrew, tied with a lock of her hair, promising perpetual protection of Messina. The letter says "Vos et ipsam civitatem benedicimus", translated to Latin –"You and your city we bless". These words recur at the foot of a big statue of the Holy Mary in the dock, one of the first sights when reaching the city by sea. The hair lock is preserved in the Cathedral and displayed on Corpus Christi in a silver galleon. 

I left Messina as an 18 year old and always lived somewhere else. Every time I come back I look around me at people, places and mannerisms with fascination and confusion, utter familiarity and distance, and I shake my head saying "Vos et ipsam civitatem". Messina has a rich tradition of dazzling, exuberant catholic processions deriving from the Counter-Reform Spanish rule era (one is of course Madonna della Lettera and the other two are the Varette during the Holy Week and the Vara on the 15th of August). 

It’s hard to grasp an entire city when you don’t live in it. Every time I go to one of these processions I am for a brief moment in time and space connected to my birthplace and my roots, but also the person I could have become if I had stayed and the person I am because I was born and brought up there and nowhere else in the world. And every time I go back I see something new I hadn’t seen before, yet seeing something I have seen a number of times since my childhood –and all faces are new and old at the same time. I also consider how people have been doing the same rituals for hundreds of years, stopped during famine, fires and earthquakes and then resumed once again and marvel at the fact that I can more or less see the same event someone in 1703 could –and wonder how they would react to such an overwhelming spectacle of sacred and profane.