Mapping the Culture Shock
On June 25th, 1981, the Centre Pompidou inaugurated Identité italienne. L’art en Italie depuis 1959. Germano Celant, the curator of the exhibition and the father of Arte Povera, wrote in the introductory essay to the catalogue: “This exhibition aims to document the ideas that made an impact, bringing together the artists who helped develop them and who represent the identity of contemporary Italy at the international level.” Forty years later, in a political landscape characterised by the resurgence of the nationalist and xenophobic right wing on the European stage—including, in Italy, the Lega and the Fratelli d’Italia, led by Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni respectively—the expression “Italian identity” is somewhat of a predicament. When considering the transformations of the Italian artistic scene since 1981, a question therefore inevitably arises: to what extent do Italian art and artists still have the power to represent “the identity of contemporary Italy”? Or, more generally, to what extent is it still possible, and indeed appropriate, to talk about identity?
The Italian scene appears to have been implicitly haunted by this question for at least three decades. After the seasons of the last artistic movements proper—the aforementioned Arte Povera, the Transavanguardia, theorised by Achille Bonito Oliva (Celant’s eternal rival), or the academic Renato Barilli’s Nuovi-nuovi—this scene has struggled to find a direction, which is therefore the subject of somewhat apprehensive debate.
UNSOLVABLE FRAGMENTATION Despite their cumbersome presence on the international scene, heavyweights such as Maurizio Cattelan, Paola Pivi or Francesco Vezzoli are certainly not the ones paving the way for Italian art, unless one is willing to accept that such a way be paved with the star system and “blaguisme” of the Berlusconian years. The Padiglione Italia of the most recent editions of the Venice Biennale—and the polemics which systematically follow the announcements of the curators and selected artists in the specialised press—have only accentuated the impression of an insoluble fragmentation and the objective difficulty of mapping the Italian scene.
These were the reflections that accompanied Villa Arson’s choice to devote an exhibition to the contemporary Italian scene. A choice made in echo and in partnership with the programming of the Mamac, which will inaugurate Vita Nuova, New Stakes in Italian Art, 1960-1975, organised by Valérie Da Costa, at the same time. Whereas the museum will present a rereading of Italy’s most radical years of economic and social transformation since the post-war period, thereby establishing a remote dialogue with Celant’s exhibition at the Pompidou, Villa Arson has chosen to focus on the Italian art scene from the 1990s to the present day, but retrospectively, in order to understand the breach that separates us from the time when it was still acceptable to speak of an “Italian identity.” Marco Scotini, the author of the curatorial project Disobedience Archive— a collection of artworks and documents which retraces four decades of disobedience in Italy and around the world—and a reference point for a whole generation of artists active in Italy during the 1990s and 2000s, immediately imposed himself as the ideal curator to give shape to this exhibition project, which was subsequently entitled The Future Behind Us—Italian Art since the 1990s. Le contemporain face au passé.
Since one of the challenges of the Future Behind Us exhibition is precisely the at
tempt to map an apparently unmappable object, it is no coincidence that the circuit imagined by Scotini opens, symbolically, with Luca Vitone’s Carta Atopica (19881992). Representing an unidentifiable geographical location, this map without a territory is foremost the symbol of a culture shock: that of a generation oriented towards the end of the revolutionary utopias that had animated the Italian political sequence of the 1970s.
UTOPIAS
These utopias included “antipsychiatry,” inspired by the reading of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and by the reformist work of Franco Basaglia, featured in the installation The Museum for Franco Basaglia (2008) by Stefano Graziani, but also the beginnings of ecological thinking that informed Bert Theis’ installations, or the feminism of Carla Lonzi, the author of the essay Let’s Spit on Hegel, present in the work of Claire Fontaine as well as that of Chiara Fumai, a performer who died in 2017. Carried by the autonomous movement of the Italian extra-parliamentary left and culminating, in 1977, in student uprisings against police brutality and the State’s turn to authoritarianism, these utopias were definitively extinguished by the series of trials begun on April 7th, 1979, and continued until 1988, when the Italian State decided to incriminate and condemn the members and supporters of the movement, accused of being the instigators of the Brigate Rosse’s red terrorism, and therefore of the assassination of Aldo Moro.
Amongst them was the philosopher Toni Negri—whose thinking later inspired the no-global movement—the protagonist of the demonstrations against the G8 in Genoa, who is at the centre of the Legal Support (2004) installation by the Alterazioni Video collective. Like many others, Negri escaped to France during the years of the trial: coincidentally, his escape began in Nice, where he arrived by boat from the Tuscan beach of Punta Ala on September 19th, 1983. The Future Behind Us exhibition also aims to highlight the intensity of the relationships and influences between Italian and French thinking during this period—we have already mentioned Deleuze and Guattari—and especially the influence that these thinkers exerted on the vast majority of the twenty artists selected by Marco Scotini: Francesco Arena, Massimo Bartolini, Rossella Biscotti, Paolo Cirio, Céline Condorelli, Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci, Danilo Correale, Rä di Martino, Irene Dionisio, Alice Guareschi, Adelita Husni-Bey, Francesco Jodice, Stefano Serretta, Stalker, in addition to those mentioned above.
By rejecting any identarian approach, by means of a undertaking that is more “hauntological” than anthological, The Future Behind Us aims at a retroactive reconstruction of unrealised futures, which continue to haunt the present. •
Translation: Juliet Powys
Vittorio Parisi has a PhD in aesthetics and is a research fellow at the ACTE Institute of the Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Since 2019, he has been head of studies and research at Villa Arson in Nice.