How will you communicate?
The art of balance is an art planet Earth has always exercised: each time it gets altered, all the life systems, processes and cycles activate to find it again. In the universe and on the Earth, everything is in continuous transformation; nothing exists without the other. Throughout billions of years of slow transformation, everything in the world – from the infinitesimal particles to the vegetal and animal world – has created that network of interconnected processes linked to air and water that allows life to develop, whereas in the briefest of times we human beings have caused an unbalance so fast and so devastating that scientists have identified a new era: the Anthropocene, the sixth mass extinction. The indiscriminate use of the planet’s resources, the increasing level of pollution in the atmosphere and the consequent climate change are the results of our behaviour, which is not sustainable anymore. In fact, by destroying the environment we are jeopardizing our own existence. After us, the Earth will find new balances.
These concepts have become very clear to me during the period of pandemic. I’ve listened to talks by academics and scientists, anthropologists and philosophers; I had already read a lot on these topics, there were not new to me. Balance is one of the focal points of our life, one of those things we don’t take notice of, like breathing, which are fundamental though. Starting from physical balance: if I lose it, I fall. If I lose my mental balance, I can’t be calm, attentive, capable, happy. If I lose balance with myself I won’t be free in my relationships with others. If humankind loses its balance with nature, if it considers itself to be on the outside of the inextricable network of vital processes, we’ll have lost true connection with life.
I don’t know if this situation linked to the pandemic will have positive or negative consequences; I know that the issue of human impact on the planet had already been raised by science over forty years ago. Culture, science, these are the weapons we have. This is what we all have to make our own and spread in any way possible: knowledge, thought, awareness. Knowledge brings freedom of thought; awareness can lead us to make different choices, can change our way of living.
The title given to this initiative struck me because in the last few years I’ve been conducting a series of performances called equiLibri (“equilibri” is the Italian for “balances”, “libri” is the Italian for “books”, translator’s note). The first was equiLibri, esercizi di conoscenza (exercises of knowledge), in February 2018. In these performances I walk with some books balancing on my head, stopping to read excerpts from each of them while standing on one leg. I read passages from diverse books to share ideas, launch a message, induce the listener to reflect on our possibilities of action. The text printed on the invitations to my performances was a combination of sentences from writings by Maurizio Ferraris, Byung-Chul Han, Shitao, Laozi: “Technology, like mythology, is a revelation progressively exposing pieces of a collective subconscious nobody has programmed. | The performance subject is faster and more productive than the subject of obedience. | Seeing deeply, not superficially, is seeing that also becomes listening, contemplating, entering in resonance with its object. | The weak can overcome the strong; everyone knows this, yet no one is able to put it into practice”.
In November 2018, I took my performance equiLibri to the MACRO, but with an important change: I invited the public to participate, everybody could bring a book from which to read, to share ideas and thoughts all together. I’ve had the opportunity to repeat this performance in other occasions adapting it to specific events and places, changing the texts that were read and the modalities of participation. In my most recent performance I read passages by two authors only, the physician Carlo Rovelli and the biologist Stefano Mancuso.
Through this performance, I share ideas that might help live in balance with ourselves, with others, with the rules of nature and of the universe. That’s why I’m interested in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s project and in the UN’s 2030 Agenda.
They are primary objectives, now more obviously than ever. We really need to communicate sustainable behaviours at personal level, from our small daily gestures to fighting against the big corporations, which exploit all kind of resources without caring about the consequences. We have to develop the awareness that we are only a small link in the chain of life’s endless processes: only people’s awareness can change a system that drives us to consume, pollute, exploit, destroy. As Stefano Mancuso says, plants are more intelligent than us, and they have a more stable system keeping them alive; we can therefore adopt the world of plants as a model to build our future. Changing our point of view, taking the leap that would allow us to plan another future, sustainable but also ethical.
On the subject of changing our point of view, I want to conclude by quoting the astronomer Carl Sagan, who in 1990 suggested that the Voyager space probe take a photograph of the Earth from six billion kilometres away: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark… There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known”.
