Against the nihilistic Italian Pavilion in Venice we would need a representation of deserted towns, collapsing farmhouses, abandoned factories: the face of the country that the cheering sheep of contemporary art don’t even know exists
“Foreigners everywhere”, “Italians nowhere”. “Foreigners everywhere” is the title of the ordinarily immigrationist, or rather invasionist, and obviously genderist and homosexualist Biennial, with an Italian Pavilion that is usually nihilistic, this time Buddhist. “Italians nowhere” is the title of my counter-Biennial, naturally dreamlike. Invited artists: Massimiliano Alioto, Andrea Chiesi, Giuliano Guatta. Three excellent painters who paint Finis Italiae, empty Italy, deserted towns, collapsing farmhouses, abandoned factories. That Italy that the cosmopolitans, the applauding sheep of contemporary art, don’t even know exists, the Italy of the Lower Po Valley and the Apennines, of the Alta Murgia and the Prealps, the Italy of the future that every demographer can explain but that no one wants to listen to. The Italy of the abandoned football field that I saw in Botticino (Brescia), a ghostly epitome of a civilization without children and therefore dead. It could be an installation simply titled “Italy”. Or the cover of a book by Agamben or Alvi. Or the subject of the paintings by Alioto, Chiesi, Guatta, if it were possible, but it is not, to find a sponsor for an exhibition so true and so sad.
