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1).
Project -
To place ten small white painted islands and as many palm-trees in
the Fiumi park; every night, after sunset, to trace a white sign in
the sky of Volterra; to create a sound element linked to these two
elements. |
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2).
Doubt -
A week ago, the director of a Spanish museum confided to me that he
had never read a single line of all the catalogues that he himself
had published in the last 10 years. Let’s assume then that there
is a reader who hasn’t been dishearted by the wave of decorative
and useless texts we are surrounded by but, what can a text give to
that reader? What is the relationship between the work of art, the
exhibition and the text? It is in fact already known that the true
artist never tells the truth. [The true artist never tells the truth,
signed "Bert Theis, true artist", P.O. Box Project, Mamco,
Geneve]. |
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3).
A day like any other-
Monday the 27th of July, on a Frankfurt-Florence flight, I read the
following news on the papers: New Guinea. The giant wave caused by
the seaquake killed more than 700 people. In Germany, in recent years,
220 biotechnology companies were created by scientists in order to
gain economically from scientific findings. In New Delhi, the cases
of cholera are raising. The typewriter of Friedrich Nietzsche is 23cm
high and 27cm long. An oil spot on the south coast of Brazil killed
hundreds of penguins. In Israel, the feared hacker Ehud Tenenbaum
is now working for the army and is on a computer company ad. In Honduras
a group of Indians destroyed the statue of Cristopher Columbus. Scientist
Lee Silver doesn’t see any philosophical problem in producing
headless human beings in order to make use of their organs. In the
Arab world, the cases of violations of human rights are raising. In
an article titled "Achieving our country", the American
philosopher Richard Rorty eulogizes national pride. Since the beginning
of hostilities, in February, Serb and Albanian deaths in Kosovo have
been 460. Orange, France: 50 tombs of the Jewish cemetery have been
profanated.
The last scene of the movie Underground by Kusturica suddendly comes
up to my mind: all the protagonists end up on a piece of land that
is getting detached from the mainland. |
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4).
A fax toFlorian-
"Lieber 10 Palmen als 1000 Eichen!" (Better 10 palm-trees
than a thousand oaks!) |
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5).
An Etruscan exorcism-
The second day I went back to Volterra alone. My suspect of the previous
day, when I was at the E.Fiumi park with Angela, Florian and Mario,
was confirmed by a more attentive visit to the Museo Etrusco: the
archetypal position of this territory is horizontal. I had never seen
so many sculptures of men and women in a rest position. The husband,
laying down with his wife on the "wedding urn", raises his
fingers in an exorcism gesture. Is he exorcising all those that force
us to get up? |
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6).
Waves -
Our planet is constantly producing a background sound: the sound of
sea and ocean waves. Sea waves produce sound waves that are speading
on the whole earth. The Theremin is a musical instrument invented
in the Soviet Union in the 20s. You play it by moving your hands and
fingers in a magnetic field, without touching anything. The Beach
Boys played it in the song "Good Vibrations". |
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7).
Question-
Is a unitary vision of the world still possible or should we content
with frammentary knowledge, giving up the millenary effort of mankind
to find a unitary theory that explains the totality of the Universe?
The genesis painted by Bartolo di Fredi on the walls of the Collegiate
of S.Gimignano is illustrating one of this historical attempts. At
present, science cannot provide a unitary theory anymore. Physics
for example, defines the Universe with two theories: the theory of
general relativity and quantum mechanics. The two theories are mutually
excluding. If the first theory is correct, then the second is wrong,
and the opposite. Can we deduct that in this historical moment, truth
is not reducible to only one platform, to a great unique tale but
is in fact consituted by a multitude of fragments, like "quarks"
of truth scattered here and there on the landscape of human thought,
as many small islands? |
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8).
The sky from a cell-
"To manage a prison, one has to be an artist too". This
statement, of the director of the penitentiary of Volterra, it is
surely worth to be long meditated. I have been struck by the closeness
of two radically different social realities: on one side a park with
its peace and serenity and, next to it, its antithesis, the fortress/prison.
My desire to do something that could link these two situations has
partially been blocked by the director of the prison: he refused to
have one of the armed guards, shooting as an artificer every day at
sunset a white light signal from the fortress walls onto the sky of
Volterra. An armed guard doing an artistic gesture would probably
lose his function of treath towards the prisoners. Art can enter prisons
only if it doesn’t change the rules at all. But which is the
role of art? |
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9).
The rule of Dioneo-
"Their discreet steward had meanwhile made up several beds in
different parts of the little valley, surrounding them with drapes
of French cretonne and bedecking them with canopies, and the king
gave leave to those who so desired to retire for their siesta: and
those who had no desire to sleep were free to amuse themselves to
their hearts’ content in various way to which they were accustomed.
[...] The sides of the hills ranges downwards in a rugular series
of terraces concentrically arranged like the tiers of an amphitheatre,
their circles gradually diminishing in size from the topmaster terrace
to the lowest." Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, Penguin Classics,
1972, page 480 and 485. |
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10).
Fifth day-
Back from Volterra to S.Gimignano. Back to the collegiate church to
further study the stories of the Old Testament of Bartolo di Fredi.
There is no doubt anymore: in paradise, man is born laying down, naked
under a palm-tree. |
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