The period we are living through makes us face our fragility as human beings, as small family units, as people.
We’ve had to change our habits and now we forcibly have time to reflect on what our habits were up to last month.
What have we lost? What was important? Have we learnt anything in the process?
If we look at the thousands of years the human being has spent on this earth, we see it intent on modifying its living environment to make it more suitable.
And as one changes the other adapts itself, in a virtuous connection, an ever-changing reflex, causing humanity to keep reprogramming itself.
Staying at home, this is the first new thing.
Interrupting work and closing personal contacts with the outside world. The second new thing.
A prolonged sharing of domestic spaces with our families for some, with our pets for others, with technology for most of us. The third new thing.
We are all threatened by an invisible illness, some of us highly exposed, some less. The fourth new thing.
Our body reminds us that it needs exercise to feel well. The fifth new thing.
Any restriction of movement affects our personal freedom: this is what is constantly experienced in prisons and in ‘compulsory structures’ in general. Now all of us are experiencing it. The sixth new thing.
This is an absolutely spontaneous and imprecise list of what I’m learning.
Science had preventively told us what would happen today in regard to the epidemic.
Science had told us what’s happening and what will happen in regard to climate change.
Our old habits (economic, political, social, personal, etc.) couldn’t believe it.
We now keep saying that everything will be fine, as an act of faith, with respect to the old habits. But if we don’t change, everything won’t be fine.
Today, culture has the responsibility of spreading a different message #toccaanoicambiare (it’s our turn to change).
Think about our image in a mirror, which – when hit with a hammer – shatters with us inside.
Breaking the mirror is like representing the transition we are all making today.
All this is scary because it shows the fragility of our lives, of us as individuals. Any system, including ours, can shatter, change, present itself in a different way. Here is where the challenge art and culture have to take up resides.
To pick up the fragments of the mirror and demonstrate that, even if broken, it keeps reflecting. We have to continue reflecting in a different way.
Art investigates the fragility of change, without being linked to superstitions. And we have to be as brave as to pick up a fragment of the mirror from the ground to be able to find ourselves again. Finding ourselves without being afraid, with curiosity, allows us to tilt towards the others, to undertake a new research, to seek a different mirror (human, animal, etc.) reflecting a new image of ourselves, a new life.
This attention to fragility, to identity, to the understanding of oneself and the others should be held dear by anybody dealing with the younger generations.
If we deprive schools of the support art offers to the youths, we risk fostering pathologies feeding on fragility. The objects art produces are manifestations, events extremely slow in releasing value: the Inca masks, the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the traces in caves, the aboriginal sounds, Leonardo’s sfumatos, De Chirico’s enigmas or Pascali’s Bachi da setola (‘bristle worms’) continue to release a ‘fragile and soft light’ after thousands or tens of years, the same way the light of the stars travels through space and reaches our planet at the highest latency. Art connects us with our history at the speed of light, it’s a jump through time that brings us close to the first sapiens, ties us to animals, at the same time showing us how culture has separated us from them.
In moments of fragility, art makes us reflect in order to create something different.
A young airman from the German army crashed and rescued in Crimea by a group of Tatar nomads during the Second World War tells us how the care of someone speaking another language saved him and turned him into an artist. That young man, then become a shaman artist, was Joseph Beuys, who – introducing us to social sculpture and the development of environmental awareness – in “I like America and America likes me” would speak in another language with an American coyote – offering a different interpretation of Calvino’s “Lezioni americane” (“Six Memos for the Next Millennium”) – about lightness, fragility, change and care.
It’s our turn to change our way of changing.
