The original Halloween was for adults and was a pretty scary event all things considered. It was taken across the Atlantic to the the States by waves of immigrants where over the years it was transformed into a more commercially minded, child orientated kind of party and from there it was re-exported back to Europe in its mutated form.

Still, watching a group of smiling Lake Angels carrying a coffin through the narrow streets of Barga Vecchia in bright Autumn sunshine did make one or two visitors to Barga stop in their tracks and pull out their cameras to record the event.

There were more cameras snapping in Piazza Angelio as well as a collection of umbrellas painted specially on the theme of Halloween by Keane were set out ready for a short video using some pretty sophisticated hardware – a Parrot Wi-Fi controlled flying quadricopter with two webcams on board which hovered above the umbrellas on the steps leading down to the piazza.

Now, all eyes are on the weather forecast for tomorrow (which for the moment looks pretty good) as nobody wants a repeat of last years Halloween which was rained out at the last moment.

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Historian Nicholas Rogers, exploring the origins of Halloween, notes that while “some folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia, it is more typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain, whose original spelling was Samuin (pronounced sow-an or sow-in)”. The name is derived from Old Irish and means roughly “summer’s end”.A similar festival was held by the ancient Britons and is known as Calan Gaeaf (pronounced Kálan Gái av).

The festival of Samhain celebrates the end of the “lighter half” of the year and beginning of the “darker half”, and is sometimes regarded as the “Celtic New Year”.

The ancient Celts believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through. The family’s ancestors were honoured and invited home while harmful spirits were warded off. It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks. Their purpose was to disguise oneself as a harmful spirit and thus avoid harm. In Scotland the spirits were impersonated by young men dressed in white with masked, veiled or blackened faces. Samhain was also a time to take stock of food supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. Bonfires played a large part in the festivities. All other fires were doused and each home lit their hearth from the bonfire. The bones of slaughtered livestock were cast into its flames.Sometimes two bonfires would be built side-by-side, and people and their livestock would walk between them as a cleansing ritual. – source

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuO0rq3I334

Halloween images from the barganews archives 1999 | 2001 | 2003 |2004 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 |

Luca Galeotti from Il Giornale di Barga shines a light on the subject

A short exhibition (lasting only three days) of some very dark umbrellas at the L’osteria in Piazza Angelio opened this evening. The artist Keane who painted a series of bright cheerful and sunny umbrellas for the Lake Angels Soul Festival this summer has gone in a completely different direction and produced instead for Halloween what could only be described as very, very dark images.

He is also testing his luck with the superstition that umbrellas should never be opened inside the house, bad luck will follow – in this case not once but 17 times.

Keane was determined to change the experience for people using the L’osteria over the next couple of days and constructed a kind of false ceiling made up of umbrellas just centimeters above their heads.

The lights the also lowered and a large amount of sawdust was spread across the floors the deaden the sound.

Visitors to the exhibition are offered a torch which then can use to cast some light on the images on show.

The images painted on the umbrellas are all loosely based around the Los Caprichos aquatint prints created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797 and 1798.

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Los Caprichos are a set of 80 aquatint prints created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797 and 1798, and published as an album in 1799. The prints were an artistic experiment: a medium for Goya’s condemnation of the universal follies and foolishness in the Spanish society in which he lived. The criticisms are far-ranging and acidic; he speaks against the predominance of superstition, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, pedagogical short-comings, marital mistakes, and the decline of rationality.

Some of the prints have anticlerical themes. Goya described the series as depicting “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual”.

The work was an enlightened, tour-de-force critique of 18th-century Spain, and humanity in general. The informal style, as well as the depiction of contemporary society found in Caprichos, makes them – and Goya himself – a precursor to the modernist movement almost a century later. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters in particular has attained an iconic status.

All of the umbrellas used in this exhibition were collected in Barga Vecchia after people had thrown them away when damaged. Once upon a time they would have been dumped but the combination of the recent death of the last umbrella repairer in Barga Vecchia, Carlo Sacco and the onslaught of the throwaway culture means that they are binned and rebought rather than repaired.

The exhibition will remain on view to the public for the next three days.