How long have I been waiting for an initiative like this. Especially for our kids. In fact, I will invite my students to take part. Next June 22nd, in a week, mark this appointment. Finally a moment of quiet, but not stasis. Of silence but not passivity. Silent Arts will be staged at the Monastery of Colonna on the afternoon of June 22nd, as you will read in the press releases. A moment in which we will approach various forms of art or real personal passions, including reading, pictorial art, writing and other “expressions” strictly without electronic devices, be they PCs or tablets or above all mobile phones.
Finally! It was time. We dedicate initiatives like these to Umberto Eco and Gianni Brera, who I often talk about to my students (obviously they didn’t even know who they were at first, then they get to know them and we read them together, with my guidance).
An idea already tested in other cities, which have christened the Silent format in its originality but also accompanying it with a standard buffet. But that’s it. In Trani it comes as a panacea. Even in Bisceglie, they tell us, they have tested Silent Arts successfully. Now it’s our turn and I say that the initiative supported by the Trani councilors De Mari, Di Lernia, Pizzichillo and Rondinone is manna from heaven, in times of stress from mobile phones, from social bullshit, from noise and guttural verses expressed almost everywhere, instead of thought. One of my students, Michelangelo (grandson of the unforgettable Michele Ladogana) of 3 G, busy with exams these days, wrote in his paper for this school year that one of the social evils is the absence of thought on the part of a large part of men and women today. Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” he wrote, “is today denied and annulled”. Apart from the satisfaction, as a professor, that I felt in reading his essay, I believe that he fully grasped the issue also addressed by our article. The theme outline essentially asked us to analyze a social problem of our times and my student hit the mark. The banality of phrases on social media, the sterile controversies, the jokes aimed at not openly and personally confronting an interlocutor with whom one should confront oneself, the river of useless words that is flooding our days spent with the cell phone in hand, are emptying the heads from thought and from every true form of art.
The photos, once printed by real photographers, now become “digital” pictures à la Antonella Clerici or holidays displayed with toe nail polish in evidence. The poems and articles have all become “posts”. More and more often people, when asking me to deal with a topic or commenting on one of my articles, say to me: “Do you write a blog?” Or: “I read your post (pronounced well this time…)
Therefore, I say it again and out loud, initiatives such as Silent Arts are welcome. For young people, but also for the less young, let it be understood that they no longer live their own existence, but a kind of permanent reflex, with a view on other people’s lives and spasmodic and compulsive control of their own permanent prosthesis: the mobile phone. Hands off Michelangelo and other young people like him.
