(scroll down for english version)
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Cosa volete che vi dica? In tutta sincerità non credevo che sarei riuscito a concludere davvero questo progetto. Come tante storie che ci capita di iniziare nella nostra fugace e provvisoria esistenza, dopo averne viste passare alcune, mettiamo in conto che le cose possono andare diversamente da quello che avevamo immaginato e programmato. Così non è senza una certa sorpresa, e anche una buona dose di gratitudine verso i miei committenti, che sono qui a scrivervi dell’ultima tappa di una trilogia espositiva dedicata ad un poeta, scrittore, regista, giornalista, intellettuale, che negli anni in cui ho continuato a leggerlo e guardarlo, non ha mai finito di sorprendermi, aiutandomi molto spesso a capire la vera natura del mondo che stavo vivendo. Oggi Pier Paolo Pasolini avrebbe ottantanove anni. Era nato il 5 marzo del 1922. Venne assassinato il 2 novembre del 1975, trentasei anni fa, all’età di cinquantatré anni. Chi ha avuto l’opportunità e la fortuna di dedicare un minimo di attenzione alla sua opera, sa che la sua presenza e la sua voce sarebbero state e sarebbero straordinariamente necessarie a tutti noi. Ma questa trilogia intitolata “Il Caos”, che riprende appunto il nome della rubrica tenuta da Pasolini dal 6 agosto del 1968 al 24 gennaio del 1970 sul settimanale “Tempo”, oltre che al poeta è dedicata non di meno ad un idea di arte che riesce ad essere parte intima del quotidiano, elemento necessario per la comprensione delle cose che vi accadono.
Quindi, come dicevo, sono qui un po’ sorpreso – e arriverei a dire anche un po’ soddisfatto, se parola e sentimento indicato non mi sembrassero sempre così fuori luogo – per diverse ragioni. La prima è senz’altro che non era così scontato che un fatto espositivo resistesse oltre il canonico consumo bi o al massimo trimestrale. Questo è infatti il tempo attuale di vita dell’evento espositivo, e al di là del consumo diretto e della sua tracciabilità on line, che dura un tempo difficilmente calcolabile, ma comunque più lungo, l’interesse del pubblico è ovviamente condizionato dalla generale quantità dell’offerta: molta offerta di eventi uguale minor tempo di durata degli stessi. Le regole del resto sono quelle del consumo culturale nell’epoca del post/iper/stra/over/consumismo. Non posso fare a meno di ricordare sull’argomento alcune pagine di “Dialettica dell’Illuminismo” di Max Horkheimer e Theodor W. Adorno, che appunto a proposito de “L’industria culturale” già all’epoca – siamo nel 1944 – descrivono perfettamente come stavano (e naturalmente stanno) le cose: “L’amusement, il divertimento, tutti gli ingredienti dell’industria culturale, esistevano già da tempo prima di essa. Ora vengono ripresi e manovrati dall’alto, e sollevati al livello dei tempi. L’industria culturale può vantarsi di avere realizzato con estrema energia, e di avere eretto a principio, la trasposizione – che era stata spesso, prima di essa, goffa e maldestra – dell’arte nella sfera del consumo, di avere liberato l’amusement delle sue ingenuità più petulanti e fastidiose e di avere migliorato la confezione delle merci.” (pagg. 142/143 dell’edizione Einaudi del 1997).
Così, anche se è perlomeno illusorio, se non proprio da ingenui, ritenere di essere sfuggiti a questa logica, è possibile dire che “Il Caos” è la dimostrazione che all’interno del sistema ci sono degli spazi, e dei tempi, che permettono manovre riflessive più ampie e più lunghe. Non è detto che tutto ciò porti a risultati più significativi. Ma questo è un altro discorso, che riguarda le modalità di giudizio dei prodotti culturali in un sistema egemonizzato dalle sottoculture, per ricordare il titolo di un interessante saggio di Massimiliano Panarari edito sempre da Einaudi (2010). Del resto anche nell’arte, soprattutto nel nostro paese, è in corso una dura battaglia tra cultura e sottoculture, e non tra cultura alta e bassa, che è un’altra cosa, in cui si cerca di riportare il dibattito sull’arte a vecchie asserzioni ottocentesche incentrate su emozione, sensualità e anche bellezza. Un secolo passato invano, verrebbe da dire. Ma a dirla tutta, questa tra cultura e sottoculture è una battaglia che riguarda solo marginalmente le arti visive e che invece ha almeno negli ultimi due decenni impegnato il fronte ben più ampio della produzione culturale in generale. Nel nostro paese è ormai evidente che la cultura sta sempre più soccombendo all’egemonia delle sottoculture, con un meccanismo inversamente proporzionale: più diminuisce l’influenza della cultura, più cresce quella delle sottoculture. Difficile dire se questo conflitto venga prima o dopo quello più generale in corso nella nostra società, nel senso che le cose sono chiaramente connesse, anche se è difficile stabilire le precedenze. Ma possiamo semplificare in questo modo, tanto per capirci: in Italia negli ultimi vent’anni i media, soprattutto quello televisivo, hanno gradualmente indotto un abbassamento del livello culturale, che ha di conseguenza causato un’inevitabile perdita di capacità critica da parte del pubblico. Indebolimento del sistema scolastico e universitario, come della ricerca e della capacità produttiva culturale, ne rappresentano una conseguenza altrettanto inevitabile, ivi comprese le relative conflittualità sociali che ne derivano. Ma nel frattempo si è fatta strada l’idea che rendere la rappresentazione delle cose più semplice e più leggera, senza i soliti, vecchi e pesanti intellettualismi, produca solo effetti positivi per tutto il corpo sociale. In tal senso reclamare il bello e l’emozione nell’arte è ritenuta la vera rivoluzione contro il cosiddetto pensiero unico dello international art system, l’unica cosa che davvero soddisfa le aspettative del pubblico. Come se poi fosse semplice sapere quali sono queste aspettative. Come sempre nelle cose più facili o più semplici, che sembrano le migliori, e a volte lo sono, si annidano anche i pericoli maggiori.
Non pensate che questi siano discorsi estranei al nostro ambito specialistico. Tutt’altro. E non solo perché qui parliamo di conflitti. L’arte e i suoi diversi protagonisti, hanno un ruolo decisivo nel nostro mondo, aldilà di quello che gli viene o meno riconosciuto dal contesto politico e sociale in cui direttamente operano. Pensate a quello che sta succedendo ad un artista come Ai Weiwei. Arrestato dalle autorità cinesi all’inizio dell’aprile di quest’anno, di lui non si è saputo praticamente più nulla, fino alla notizia del 25 aprile che riporta di una confessione su presunti reati fiscali, estorta sotto tortura. Dopodiché di nuovo silenzio totale. La forza delle idee di Ai Weiwei, delle sue azioni, delle sue opere, è per il regime di quel paese più pericolosa di qualsiasi atto di sabotaggio pratico. Ed è vero. Il governo cinese ha ragione a temere la libertà e la potenza del pensiero di Weiwei, perché sono queste cose che hanno cambiato il mondo e che continueranno a cambiarlo. Purtroppo, come dice Salman Rushdie in un toccante articolo pubblicato su “La Repubblica” del 27 aprile 2011, anche se le opere hanno la capacità di essere pericolose e di durare oltre i loro censori, “La vita degli artisti è più fragile delle loro creazioni.”.
Ma veniamo alla seconda ragione della mia sorpresa per essere arrivato sin qui. Oltre l’esperimento di dare un tempo di tre anni ad un’idea per essere elaborata, verificata ed espansa, la sorpresa è appunto conseguenza dell’aver potuto ragionare, con gli artisti e attraverso le loro opere, su questioni che saturano la cronaca di questi anni e di questi giorni. Più di una volta, nel corso del tempo de “Il Caos”, è capitato che le coincidenze fossero sorprendenti e che venisse anche il dubbio di essere troppo a ridosso dei fatti e di non riuscire a prendere le misure giuste per lavorare serenamente sul tema in oggetto. L’idea di una finestra aperta direttamente sul reale, con documentari esposti al fianco delle opere degli artisti, è servita appunto ad esorcizzare in modo omeopatico questa paura. Pensate ad esempio all’intervento in Libia cominciato alla fine di marzo, che ha di fatto cambiato la prospettiva sul tema dei conflitti, radicalizzandone volente o nolente il senso nella direzione pressoché univoca della guerra. Di fronte a macrofatti come quelli che accadono nel mondo arabo, perdono inevitabilmente forza emblematica i microfatti rappresentati dai conflitti interiori, famigliari, generazionali e così via. La dimensione collettiva della guerra, l’origine sociale che ha in particolare questa libica e che in generale è alla base delle rivoluzioni che stanno cambiando in modo sorprendente il mondo arabo, reclamano un’attenzione senza alternative. E così è stato, nel senso che la mostra si è fatalmente polarizzata sull’espressione più estrema del conflitto, quella della guerra appunto. Il docufilm “Ward 54”, che accompagna le opere in mostra, la nostra connessione diretta con la realtà, è stato scelto proprio per questo. È infatti un documento drammatico sui traumi che subiscono i soldati in zona di guerra, il tristemente famoso PTSD (disordine da stress post-traumatico). Girato da Monica Maggioni, che per anni è stata inviata della Rai sul fronte iracheno, addirittura unica giornalista italiana aggregata ai marines durante la seconda guerra del golfo, il documentario racconta attraverso l’esperienza di un ex marine, Kris Goldsmith, il dramma dei soldati che rientrano a casa. La storia di Godsmith, il suo tentativo di suicidio e il viaggio che compie attraverso gli Stati Uniti alla scoperta di storie simili alla sua, mostra l’angoscia in cui vivono i reduci. Negli Stati Uniti ogni giorno, secondo la rivista “Army Times”, diciotto veterani si suicidano. Nonostante tutto molti militari continuano a non chiedere sostegno, avendo paura di subire ritorsioni morali e legali dall’amministrazione militare. Kris Goldsmith è stato uno dei pochi che ha testimoniato la propria storia davanti al Congresso, e ora combatte una battaglia civile e legale contro l’amministrazione militare, che rifiuta di congedarlo con onore a causa del suo tentativo di suicidio, di fatto non riconoscendo il danno psicologico causato dalla sua partecipazione ad azioni di combattimento.
Digitando semplicemente conflitto su google, scopro sul sito it.peacereporter.net/conflitti/9/1, che nel mondo sono in corso attualmente trentuno conflitti. C’è anche un’immagine con la mappa del pianeta, le localizzazioni e il numero delle vittime. Mancano i dati ultimissimi del conflitto in Libia, e delle rivoluzioni in Tunisia, Egitto, Siria, Algeria, Marocco, Yemen, Bahrain, ma forse anche Iran e Arabia Saudita, immagino perché i dati non sono ancora reperibili in modo certo. Arriviamo così al buon numero di trentaquattro, trentacinque e forse anche più situazioni di conflitto in corso. Se non è un intero pianeta in guerra, poco ci manca.
“Il CAOS #3 – I conflitti”, isola di San Servolo, Venezia, giugno/luglio 2011
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English version
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Conflicts in the era of chaos
What would you like me to say? Honestly I didn’t think I would ever manage to complete this project. As many stories which we have the opportunity to begin in our fleeting and provisory existence, after having seen some disappear, we accept that things can go differently from the way in which we had imagined and planned for. For this it is not without some surprise, and also a large amount of gratitude to my clients, that I am write about the last part of an exhibitory trilogy dedicated to a poet, writer, director, journalist, and intellectual, who, during the years in which I have continued to read and watch him, has never ceased to surprise me often helping me to understand the true nature of the world which I was living in. Today Pier Paolo Pasolini would have been eighty-eight years old. He was born on the 5th March 1922. He was assassinated the 2nd November, 1975, thirty-six years ago, at the age of fifty-three. Those who had the opportunity and the fortune to dedicate even some attention to his work, know that his presence and his voice were, and would be, extraordinarily necessary to all of us. But this trilogy entitled “Il Caos”, taking its name from the column written by Pasolini from the 6th August 1968 to the 24th January 1970 in the weekly magazine “Tempo”, is dedicated, in addition to the poet, to an idea of art which is an intimate part of our everyday life, an element necessary for understanding the things which happen to you.
So, as I said, I am here a little surprised – and I would say even somewhat satisfied, if the word itself and its meaning didn’t seem so out of place – for various reasons. The first is without doubt that it was never to be assumed that an expository event could resist beyond the canonical two or three month duration. This is the present lifespan of an exhibitory event, and beyond the direct consumption and its traceability online, which lasts for period which is almost impossible to measure but in any event is longer than the show itself, the interest of the public is obviously conditioned by the general quantity of the offer: many events offered equals a shorter duration of the events themselves. The rules are those of cultural consumption in the era of post/super/over/consumerism. I must take the opportunity to recall a few apt pages from “Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, which apropos the “Cultural Industry” of the period – 1944 – perfectly describe how things were (and obviously are): “Amusement, enjoyment, all of the ingredients of the cultural industry, existed long before it did. Now they are taken up again and operated from above, and raised to the level of the times. The cultural industry can boast of having realised with great energy, and of having founded, the transposition – which before this had often been awkward and clumsy – of art in the field of consumption, of having liberated amusement from its tiresome and irritating ingenuity and of having improved the packaging of the goods.” (Pgs 142/143, Einaudi, 1997).
In this way, even if it is not least illusory, if not ingenuous, to believe to have escaped this logic, it is possible to say that “Il Caos” is the demonstration that within the system there are spaces, and times, which allow reflective operations of a wider scope and longer duration. It is not to be said that this necessarily leads to more meaningful results. This however is another subject, which looks at the manner in which cultural products are judged in a system dominated by subcultures, to recall the title of an interesting text by Massimiliano Panarari published by Einaudi (2010). In art, above all in our country [Italy], a difficult battle is going on between culture and subculture, and not between high and low culture, which is another thing, where the discussion of art uses old nineteenth century assertions centred on emotions, sensuality and even beauty. A century spent in vane, one might say. But in honesty, this battle between culture and subculture is one which only marginally appertains to the visual arts and which instead has, in the last two decades, concentrated on something much wider than cultural production in general. In our country [Italy] it is now evident that culture yields ever more to the dominant subculture, with a mechanism inversely proportional: the more that the influence of culture diminishes, the more which that of subculture grows. It is difficult to say if this conflict comes before or after that more general one which is happening in our society, in the sense that the two are clearly connected, even if it is difficult to establish the precedence. We can simplify in this way: in Italy the political power in the last twenty years has, for evident reasons, decided to exert influence and control via the means of media, above all that of television, and this has lead to a slow introduction of a lowering of general culture, consequently causing the gradual but inexorable removal of the public’s critical capacity. The weakening of the scholastic and university system, like that of research and an ability for cultural production, have naturally a decisive link to this strategy. Conflict generates exactly from these practical actions which obviously have real and direct social consequences. In the meantime the idea has taken off that to make representations of things more simple and less dense, without the usual old, heavy, intellectual, aspects, produces exclusively positive effects for the social body. In this sense to require beauty and emotion in art is believed to be the true revolution against the single thought of the international art system, the only thing which moves to meet the true expectations of the public. As if it were simple to know what these expectations are. As ever with the simplest or easiest things, those which seem the best, and at times actually are, exactly there are harboured the greatest dangers. And this is something which everyone in a position to know is aware of, but it is a position which they have decided to assume in the famous field in which inevitably one descends, which determines to what extent they are compliant with what is happening.
These are not issues outside the field of our specialist subject. In fact it is the very opposite, and not only because we are considering conflicts. Art and its diverse protagonists have an important role in our world, beyond that which they are recognised as having or not having in the social politic context in which they directly operate. Think of what is happening to an artist such as Ai Weiwei. Arrested by the Chinese authorities at the start of April of this year, nothing further was heard of him until the 25th April when his confession was reported over alleged fiscal crimes, forced by torture. Following this there was yet again total silence. The strength of the ideas of Ai Weiwei, of his actions, of his works, is, for the Chinese regime, more dangerous than any other act of practical sabotage. And it is true. The Chinese government is justified in fearing the liberty and the strength of thought of Weiwei, because these are the things which have changed the world and which will continue to change it. Unfortunately, as Salman Rushdie notes in a moving article published in “La Repubblica” on the 27th April 2011, even if his works have the ability to be dangerous and to outlast their censors, “The life of artists is more fragile than their creations.”.
But here we come to the second reason for my surprise at reaching this point. In addition to the experiment of giving a three year life to an idea to be elaborated, verified and expanded, the surprise is a consequence of having been able to discuss with the artists and through their works, issues which fill the newspapers of these years and days. More than once, in the course of “Il Caos”, the coincidences have been surprising, giving rise to the worry that we may be too close to the news; that we might be unable to find the proper measure to work with tranquillity on the theme in discussion.
The idea of an open window on reality, with documentaries shown next to the works of the artists, served to naturally counteract this fear. Think for example of the intervention in Libya which began at the end of March and changed the perspective on the theme of conflicts, radicalizing them in the almost unequivocal direction of war. Faced with macro facts like those which happen in the Arab world, the micro facts represented by conflicts of an interior, familial, generational and other nature inevitably lose their emblematic strength. The collective dimension of war, the social origin in particular of the Libyan war and that which is generally at the base of the revolutions which are so surprisingly changing the Arab world, call for an alternative attention. And that is how it was, in the sense that the exhibition has been inevitably polarised on the most extreme expression of conflict, that of war. The docu-film “Ward 54” which accompanies the works exhibited and is our direct connection with reality, was chosen exactly for this. It’s a dramatic document on the traumas which the soldiers in war zones suffer, the infamous PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder). Filmed by Monica Maggioni, for years was the special correspondent for Rai in Iraq and the only Italian journalist to work with the marines during the second Gulf war, the documentary recounts the drama of the soldiers who return home using the experience of an ex-marine Kris Goldsmith. The tale of Goldsmith, his attempt at suicide and the journey which he made across America in search of other stories like his own, shows the anguish in which the ex-servicemen live. According to the magazine “Army Times”, in the United States each day eighteen veterans kill themselves. Notwithstanding this many soldiers continue to not ask for help, afraid of receiving moral or legal retaliation from the military administration. Kris Goldsmith was one of few who testified his story in front of Congress, and now is fighting a legal and civil battle against the military which refuses to dismiss him with an honourable discharge due to his suicide attempt and does not recognise the psychological damage caused by his participation in combat.
Typing in “conflicts” on Google, on the site it.peacereporter.net/conflitti/9/1, I discovered that in the world at the moment there are thirty-one conflicts in action. There is also an image with the map of the world, the sites and numbers of victims. The data for the most recent conflicts in Libya, the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Bahrain, and also those in Iran and Saudi Arabia, is missing, presumably because the information isn’t yet reliable. With these we arrive at thirty-four, thirty-five and perhaps more, situations of conflict happening now. If the whole planet is not at war, it almost is.
From the 11th September 2001 history has suffered a massive blow which put it decidedly in motion, making one think of the end which Francis Fukuyama predicted in his text in the now distant 1992.
The problem is that amongst all the possible directions towards which one may go, history chose the least desirable. Naturally this is something which is the responsibility of the animators of history- that us that we tend to exclude ourselves from but which in reality gives us the proof of our existence and the measure of the responsibility which we have.
The exhibition runs on these lines of Conflict with a capital “C”, of war and all that is connected to it, that physical psychological violence that leads to it and is produced as a consequence, becoming non-disposable waste for humanity. In the way that has always been true for art, it does it by trying to bring the real that is visible outside of its condition as a simple real fact, to make it emblematic of that same reality which in this way is enriched with a new sense. A withdrawal which, via a process of manipulation, becomes an enriched return. It is an action which supposes an ethical affirmation innate to that same sense of responsibility which we included in the inevitable confirmation of our existence. The artist cannot have this ethical responsibility when he looks at, and in the case of Gabriele Basilico photographs, the ruins of Beirut. In that moment the semi destroyed palace or the deserted street, become elements endowed with an unequivocal visual character, no longer dissociable from the significance which they include. The image of Beirut in 1991 in Basilico’s photos becomes in this way a symbolic image naturally showing the devastation of war, but which above all tells of the emptiness and silence which it leaves.
The assumption of the responsibility of the artist and the following ethical action which he carries out with his work are today more than ever decisive for defining and qualifying the role of art in our society.
Apropos this, it is evident that it is always more necessary to meet the demands which in various ways and circumstances call for clarity on the meaning and role of art of the present.
Having lost that preeminent aesthetic function which over the centuries, including part of the twentieth, had guaranteed art with a function which could not be detracted in our social and cultural context, today we are at the point that the fine arts are no longer beautiful, and are absolutely uninterested in competing or contributing to that environmental “aesthetic-isation” in which we have gradually found ourselves in the last twenty years. The fine arts are no longer “fine”, although this continues to be their institutional label, making their collective fruition ambiguous and the source of incomprehension ever more difficult to reconcile. To begin to make some clarity in this sense, it is important to say that in an inversely proportional way to the process of aesthetic-isation which was confirmed in the post-industrial society, and in an ever more unequivocal way at the end of the last century, art has given gradually greater value to the hypothesis of being a form of conscience which is not exhaustive in the representative capacity of the world. In other words its being a form of knowledge does not consist in the replacing in form, as it was in the aesthetic interpretation rather than in the substance which from the middle of the eighteenth century the past and future of art was conditioned. Art is above all and prevalently a question about the nature and sense of the space time in which it is, and naturally on our being in that dimension. The image is an accomplishable form for that interrogative experience and the following response, definable as a form of conscience. If we go to a museum convinced that we are seeing something beautiful and we find ourselves in front of a video, a performance or a photograph by Regina Josè Galindo, which totally ignore beauty as such, and rather pose questions about and search for answers about the lack of liberty, violence, the brutality of executions and the pain of victims, in fact we risk misunderstanding the value of the work of art even if we intercept the sense of those images and those actions. Speaking of Galindo, as for the other artists about whom we will speak later, conflict, its motivations and its consequences, are an essential part of the questions which move the realisation of works through which we have the possibility of understanding much more about the dynamic in which we live. The aesthetic question is evidently secondary even where it is perceivable as such. That the photo might have an aesthetic value in itself, that it might be appreciable in its exclusive dimension of an image, naturally are aspects of no value when separated from the content. Again in the case of Basilico, in whose work the exclusivity of the photographic language could lead to different considerations, the images in themselves don’t assume an aesthetic value apart from their content. If this were the case for the photos of Beirut, for example, they wouldn’t have the symbolic strength which they have, because in a short time, as happens for all images which have only a formal and aesthetic dimension, they would be replaced by other more efficient and up to date versions.
The questions which lead to a work of art and which the work creates, are decisive for the comprehension of the position which art itself has in our reality. It is from this that we must depart and it is this on which we must work to bring art to a dimension of wide and collective fruition.
With regards to collectivity, the work of Kaarina Kaikkonen is an example of how this idea can be used as an essential element in reflection and of how it can become the preeminent visible element. Her installations with the shirts, jackets and other items of clothing hung on wires or piled up are as suggestive as they are referable to a simple daily routine, caught in its most ordinary dimension. But it is exactly that path which we recognise and which Kaikkonen invites us to follow which leads us elsewhere. The hanging clothes take on the essentiality of the community, of the relationship as usual practice, undividable from the same dimension of the individual. Naturally in this, at the same time and in a manner again inseparable there is the idea of conflict as a possibility. The lightness of the shirts hung out, blown by the wind, coloured – an image of familiar serenity, of a small community taken with the daily chores. But it is also the physical memory of the men and women who wore them. In those shirts people lived, sweated, kissed, suffered, were happy and perhaps today no longer, disappearing from our eyes like those of the world. In this absence there is the melancholy of a sense of loss which sweetly insinuates its way into the beguiling vision of the colour of the shirts under the sun.
There are a further two works which show a strong dependency on the idea of collectivity, that of the video of Tigran Khachatryan, Nachalo, and Antipodes by Amir Yatziv. The latter is an Israeli artist who has chosen to work on a historic paradox by means of a paradoxical situation practiced today. For two years, from 2008 to 2010, Yatziv participated in the training for “war games”, an educative simulation of military tactics, training in the woods between Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Sweden. The simulated battle using compressed ceramic powder bullets, which is documented in the video is that between Wermacht, the German army of the Third Reich and the Tzahal, the army of the State of Israel. Naturally it is almost too clear in which way Yatziv puts into play the idea of his community, giving them finally the possibility of fighting equally with those who were responsible for their extermination. It is the idea of being in front of a game which makes the break between the too obvious meaning of the set up and its ultimate meaning. The same historic reality wavers in front of a time slide such as this. The conflict, the absurd desire that it might become possible, remain the founding reason behind the game, creating a series of ricochets of sense, always more surreal as one proceeds within the game.
Tigran Khachatryan also works on a collective fact, that of the revolution and on the myth on which the regime constructed its own legitimacy. It takes it start from the film Beginning from 1967 by the Armenian director Artavazd Peleshyan starts. The film was realised to celebrate the fifty year anniversary of the revolution of 1917. Khachatryan’s video, Nachalo, from 2007, celebrated the ninety year anniversary of the revolution. The coincidence places in motion mechanisms where there are overlaps between past and present, film footage and those filmed as documentaries of the youth culture post-punk, between the idea of a revolution, vital in its erotic and liberating aspect and that of a bureaucratic apparatus which contrasts those same thrusts. The images show a continuous tension, a conflict in becoming which blocks the sight of other possible solutions.
The photographic series Untitled by Raffaella Crispino also shows a collectivity, that of a group of young Israeli men who train on a beach in Tel Aviv. The images of this community in its composition are alternated with those of architecture and landscapes of Palestine and Israel. A play of relationships between simple images, between which there is no particularly strong relationship from an iconographic point of view, nor even from the point of view of the meaning which can be taken directly from the images. In the whole an instable geometry of forms is created, a strange relationship between nature and architecture, on which rests the muscular tension of the men who exercise using the bar. And it is exactly this element which begins to dominate over the entire composition, but which controls also the landscape and the same architecture.
An idea of strength ready to strike, which is in the mountains but also in the houses which take on the semblance of true defensive bastions. The conflict is permanent and latent, belonging to the daily and accompanying every event.
Conflict is also a permanent condition for Alejandro Vidal. His scenes of street violence, images of fights, extreme sex, form a range of various types of conflict which it constantly confirms. It is a sort of preparatory journey towards the comprehension of the fact that violence is a connecting thread which passes through our world uninterruptedly. Vidal creates strategies of tension using colours and forms which in reality could also not generate any sense of danger, and which instead mark ill-defined alarms and impose a state of vigilance. Somewhere in a great country is a collection of images in which the explosion of violence has just happened. The successive silence is awaited and anticipated by the monochrome colour change.
Apropos emotions generated by states of mind, Piero Mottola made a true catalogue of them, associating emotions and sounds via a statistic which determined an articulated range. He then constructed a device, a piece of software, which he called a “self-examiner”, which receives the initial input, in this case those typical of conflict, and composes music autonomously. It does this via pre-recorded figurative sounds, or via musical notes which correspond to those sounds by frequency. Here we find ourselves in front of a wall of sound of ten emotionally connected speakers. A conflict which the self-examiner continues to generate for the entire duration of the exhibition. Even when the speakers are switched off at night the computer will continue to run the programme which will then continue to generate the sound conflict produced by emotions such as pain, fear, hate, agitation, sadness and so on; a concert of all the emotions which conflicts can generate in our souls.
All that remains at this point is for me to tell you about a special exhibition which pays homage to Pasolini through a further homage to Fabio Mauri, who passed away on the 20th May of 2009. It is a video entitled “Intimità di Pasolini” from 2005. Mauri reads a text which he had written in 1995 for the conference “Pasolini a Bologna” curated by Gianni Scalia and Davide Ferrari (1998, Edizioni Pendragon, Bologna).
It is a text which talks about his relationship with the poet and poetry. It’s affecting to hear those words of a love still very much alive for Pasolino from the voice of an artist such as Mauri, about his greatness as an artist and poet: “ I loved Piero very much. If anybody was ever a master, he was my young master. The one that you disobey. I disobeyed a lot. Not in Bologna, but in Rome. Without Pier Paolo I spent a period of ten years of illness and religion.” […] “Later when we renewed contact, the year of his death, we found that we had a common interest in our lasting passion for poetry and intent in the penetration of the current, rather than general, meaning of life. The up-to-dateness acted as an efficient symptom of the final meaning. An eternity caught live.”.
An eternity caught live. It’s something which all of us should hope to have at least once in our lives. I think that the only way to achieve it is through art.
“Il CAOS #3 – I conflitti”, isola di San Servolo, Venezia, 2011 june/july
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L”articolo è stato pubblicato nel sito www.raffaelegavarro.it
Immagine di copertina: Ward 54 (2010), di Monica Maggioni. Frame da Film. Prodotto da Mediakite e RaiCinema.
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Raffaele Gavarro è critico d’arte e curatore indipendente. E’ stato curatore responsabile dell’attività espositiva sull’Isola di San Servolo a Venezia dal 2005 al 2010 e curatore indipendente al Macro di Roma nel 2006. E’ stato direttore artistico di V_Venice Videoart Fair dal 2006 al 2007, del Festival Internazionale Videominutoal Centro Pecci di Prato dal 2008 al 2010 e della fiera romana ArtO’_Art Fair in Open City nel 2009. Dal 2011 è Direttore artistico del Premio Maretti_Valerio Riva Memorial. Nel 2012 ha curato la partecipazione italiana alla 11th Bienal Habana 11 maggio/11 giugno 2012. Ha pubblicato numerosi saggi dedicati ad artisti italiani e internazionali in monografie e cataloghi di mostre collettive. Dal 2011 è direttore della collana Icarus per la Maretti Editore, dedicata a progetti speciali di artisti italiani e internazionali. Nel 2007 ha pubblicato il saggio “Oltre l’estetica” per la Meltemi Editore, Roma.