il viaggiatore incantato
il viaggiatore incantato -The enchatnted pilgrim
https://vimeo.com/232330560
The writings, divided in travels, the video we made, are inspired by two texts that have much in common: The Tales of a Russian Pilgrim and Leskov’s The Enchanted Traveller (together with Benjamin’s famous essay dedicated).
The first is an ascetic text, in which the pilgrim travels around Russia and beyond (the text also has a subsequent follow-up) tormented by the actual realization of St. Paul’s motto, which inquires to pray incessantly. Given the fortune of the text, from a tale of fantastic journeys and teaching was born a continuous wandering, of the many who wanted to join his research and discover his places. The second is a novel about the wanderings of young Ivan, between fantasies and pieces of reality, between adventures of all kinds told with a simple language. Benjamin, and in this lies the meaning of our work, identifies precisely in this kind of narrative, similar to the fairytale, how much more different from the bourgeois novel, a real possibility to interpret reality.
The protagonist of the video is a friend of ours, who has had the most bizarre experiences in his life: from following a circus to working with travelling merry-go-rounds, from doing Katanga (service of order of the 1968 students movement) in the 70s to working in Libya with an Italian company that dealt with technology. Always traveling, always looking for unusual forms, closer, according to him, to nature and to a kind of spiritual life. Until, specifically, he was hitchhiking around the world as the son of flowers, he found himself in India. He kept precise memories of this history, common to many in the 70’s, that over time they were transformed fairy-tale, because those experiences were important for him, but at the same time abandoned when he had to “settle down”. Gestures now lived with the naive hope of their usefulness regardless, trusting that they will keep their own magic within themselves.
In the video, then, we see, directly from his memories of India, the position of the snake, that of the spider and others still not better defined. The body and the face poetically bring on theirself, in the many wrinkles, the weight and the cost of that life.
And it is precisely this fairy-tale appearance, this gentle naivety in a person who offers his past to a group of friends, while knowing that a first reaction can be a laugh, a mockery, that made us wonder if there is a place (physical or metaphorical) where we can live out of the pervasive conditioning of the Market. We as a collective have faced, starting from the initial point of our work, the provocation of the drafting and diffusion of the Manifesto for a commercial art, the theme of the Market and the Art Market in particular.
Trying to guess at least, since we are immersed in it as much as anyone else, the mechanisms and the level of the interweaving that in our opinion binds every living person, every man and every woman, in every expression, including the artistic one, to the Market. How our emotions change, our perception of the world, even our body in mutation.
The amazement for the performance of that night, because the journey takes place, as natural in a fairy tale, in the deepest night, put us in doubt. Can these contemporary wanderings escape from the novel of the Market, can they be, perhaps unconsciously as in the stories of the lives of saints and mystics, but also of the simple Ivan of Leskov, fairy-tale ways to a different life, resistant to the process of our change? Or, if not resisting, escaping from the flow of the Market?
The writings, divided in travels, the video we made, are inspired by two texts that have much in common: The Tales of a Russian Pilgrim and Leskov’s The Enchanted Traveller (together with Benjamin’s famous essay dedicated).
The first is an ascetic text, in which the pilgrim travels around Russia and beyond (the text also has a subsequent follow-up) tormented by the actual realization of St. Paul’s motto, which inquires to pray incessantly. Given the fortune of the text, from a tale of fantastic journeys and teaching was born a continuous wandering, of the many who wanted to join his research and discover his places. The second is a novel about the wanderings of young Ivan, between fantasies and pieces of reality, between adventures of all kinds told with a simple language. Benjamin, and in this lies the meaning of our work, identifies precisely in this kind of narrative, similar to the fairytale, how much more different from the bourgeois novel, a real possibility to interpret reality.
The protagonist of the video is a friend of ours, who has had the most bizarre experiences in his life: from following a circus to working with travelling merry-go-rounds, from doing Katanga (service of order of the 1968 students movement) in the 70s to working in Libya with an Italian company that dealt with technology. Always traveling, always looking for unusual forms, closer, according to him, to nature and to a kind of spiritual life. Until, specifically, he was hitchhiking around the world as the son of flowers, he found himself in India. He kept precise memories of this history, common to many in the 70’s, that over time they were transformed fairy-tale, because those experiences were important for him, but at the same time abandoned when he had to “settle down”. Gestures now lived with the naive hope of their usefulness regardless, trusting that they will keep their own magic within themselves.
In the video, then, we see, directly from his memories of India, the position of the snake, that of the spider and others still not better defined. The body and the face poetically bring on theirself, in the many wrinkles, the weight and the cost of that life.
And it is precisely this fairy-tale appearance, this gentle naivety in a person who offers his past to a group of friends, while knowing that a first reaction can be a laugh, a mockery, that made us wonder if there is a place (physical or metaphorical) where we can live out of the pervasive conditioning of the Market. We as a collective have faced, starting from the initial point of our work, the provocation of the drafting and diffusion of the Manifesto for a commercial art, the theme of the Market and the Art Market in particular.
Trying to guess at least, since we are immersed in it as much as anyone else, the mechanisms and the level of the interweaving that in our opinion binds every living person, every man and every woman, in every expression, including the artistic one, to the Market. How our emotions change, our perception of the world, even our body in mutation.
The amazement for the performance of that night, because the journey takes place, as natural in a fairy tale, in the deepest night, put us in doubt. Can these contemporary wanderings escape from the novel of the Market, can they be, perhaps unconsciously as in the stories of the lives of saints and mystics, but also of the simple Ivan of Leskov, fairy-tale ways to a different life, resistant to the process of our change? Or, if not resisting, escaping from the flow of the Market?
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