Serena Fineschi. “Assisting the Darkness” is a public art project whose genesis goes way back. It was born in 2014 on the occasion of my work Stato di Grazia (State of Grace), in which I interrupted the public and monumental lighting of the entire historic center of the city of Siena. The city was suspended and filled with darkness for three minutes. A dark suspension in which the historic center was temporarily covered in black, shrouded in the darkness of an aesthetic and emotional short-circuit.
I was interested in the possibility, through the accomplishment of a pure and unique, almost accidental and furtive sign, how one could transform, overturn, manipulate the state of things, the space of the everyday and, at the same time, create a total and totalizing work. Turning off the lights in my city, without any prior communication to the citizenry, meant intervening not only in architectural or aesthetic manipulation but taking care of the present and presences, to return to the human and the urban. To return to listening to oneself and reflecting on the meaning of our inhabiting the world, to momentarily slow down the time of our living covered by something good to put on. State of Grace is a melodrama divided into three emotional acts where bewilderment, tension and stillness follow one another in the time of an entire existence, moderated and lived in a few minutes.
Today, this work appears even more transparent to me; a monumental pictorial work in which a sharp stroke of darkness transforms animate and inanimate space into a “state of grace,” that humanly divine condition, assumption of consciousness and knowledge above all imagined beauty, in which anything can happen.
Eleven years later, the idea of “Assisting the Dark” is the place and space to share that higher condition in which only the beauty and wonder of art can console us from the darkness that surrounds us. On this journey, shared with sixteen other artists who have decided to accept my invitation to participate (Elena Bellantoni, Bianco-Valente, Gianni Caravaggio, Francesco Carone, Alice Cattaneo, Loris Cecchini, Fabrizio Cotognini, Elena El Asmar, Flavio Favelli, Loredana Longo, Maurizio Nannucci, Luca Pancrazzi, Fabrizio Prevedello, Remo Salvadori, Sissi, Giovanni Termini), there have been numerous difficulties but just as many moments of enchantment. Seventeen permanent works in the historic center of Siena are my gift to the city in which I was born.
In this continuous amazement, the intervention designed by Flavio Favelli has suffered a form of censorship by city institutions, leaving the sense of wonder fragmented. The work is unfinished, partial, frayed of its contours.
Censorship in art is a complex and controversial phenomenon that has spanned centuries of history, taking different forms depending on the political, social and cultural context. Art, by its nature, represents a free and individual form of expression, capable of exploring disturbing themes and challenging pre-established conventions.
I wonder if the new demand for morality directed toward art can be considered a return to the past. What is certain is that, the regulatory provisions of public art and an increasingly neurotic approach by the public and institutions are a new space on which to build a dialogue. Compared to the past, everything has changed, proportionally. The greater the artist’s zone of movement and making, the greater the fear of limiting his “representation.” In contemporary artistic languages, paradigms have changed, the references of ethics and aesthetics have been transformed, and it becomes increasingly complex to understand what limits (and if any) where artists can push themselves in full awareness of their expressive freedom, experimentation, interpretation, and the constraints (and if any) imposed by political, cultural and social evaluations.
So, I wonder and ask you, where is the boundary between freedom of expression and social responsibility? In a world where images and ideas circulate rapidly and uncontrollably, it is fair to ask whether censorship represents a means of ensuring public order or rather an instrument of ideological control.
Flavio Favelli. In Western history, art has always been distant from the real, representation, then a territory where one could innovate and finally an exception that confirms the rule, and precisely because of this exceptionality, this “fiction”, artists were able to express themselves freely, showing different points of view, somehow “other,” different and “contrary” to what passed the convent of society, politics, custom, tradition and morality. To not allow this exceptionalism to show itself is to undermine the difference between the West and the East, where the former, despite crimes and shadows, allowed the individual to fully understand the meaning of freedom. Today our country is at war with Russia to defend freedom, which means freedom of expression not allowed in “Eastern” countries. I believe that for the artist there should be no question about responsibility: if art is not real, is fiction, as it should be, the problem does not arise. It is like the image in the mirror, it is a reflection, it is a ghost, and whoever interprets the ghost as a real person makes a big mistake. Unfortunately, today, along with power, politics and the institution, many artists also want to give art a “real” meaning, but they do not know that they play right into the hands of the censors: both of them thus bend art toward an idea of “good” or to something “positive,” thus assuming that they know what is “good” or “evil” (just like the Church of Rome), a matter not pertinent to art and the free artist. Commitment to “changing things” puts art “down to earth,” bringing it down to the same level as concrete, useful, prosaic affairs so dear to power. In cinema, blood is syrup; those who mistake it for real blood have problems.
SF.“Assisting the Darkness” is a public art project. Public art interacts directly with a community, becoming an integral part of the everyday landscape and helping to redefine the meaning of common spaces. What is making public art for you and what are the reflections that led you to make your intervention for “Assisting the Darkness”?
FF. I have made many works in public space although I do not adhere to the ideology of Public Art , which, as one of its fathers, Alberto Garutti, said, has the purpose of talking about the citizens and to the citizens, a purpose that for me is uninteresting and, among other things, very dangerous. You have to understand what you want to give to society: either what you expect or give a different and new point of view, and novelty, in a country like Italy, which comes from a rural and often underdeveloped culture, is always a problem. The Italian citizen, generally conservative, would always like a continuity with the past, which in Italy is great art, but this means an immobile landscape, armored by the chamberlains of the superintendence who always interpret any contemporary art project in a conservative way. This leaves a landscape that reflects an idea of beauty that is static and anachronistic and above all consolatory. Article 9 of the Constitution says, “The Republic shall promote the development of culture,” and then cites protection, but the reality is that the opposite always happens. There is a great difficulty in promoting art in public space. In red Bologna, the city of DAMS and progress, the last permanent work in a historic square was done in 1972 (sic!) with Arnaldo Pomodoro’s cylinders, more than half a century ago. There is a kind of embarrassment to consider the work of the contemporary artist, as if it were inherently inferior to the art of the past. For me, making art in public space certainly means trying to understand the context, but always putting my poetics before the territory, because the role of the artist is to give different images, while the community just wants to preserve the pre-existing. The conscious artist is a child of the Avant-garde, to whom great ideas and values are acknowledged that cannot be shared by a society educated generally by TV and social media. The questions that citizens and administrators ask me, in so many interventions made, are always the same and they are twofold: what does it mean? What does it haveto do with anything? But does it always have to say something? Something specific? Preferably black or white? And does it always have to fit with the context? And if it doesn’t fit or theme with the territory, what would happen? Would it disturb the sleep of an often bored citizen? What about all the art of the Past, with a capital P, the kind everyone refers to, was it always themed? And what would the theme be? Some kind of canon of the ancient spanning a dozen centuries? Or are we perhaps only talking about the visual horizon of the citizen who contemplates only that in which he was born and which forms his identity that has turned from quaint parochialism into rabid sovereignty? In San Casciano Val di Pesa, Mario Merz put a deer on the walls in the late 1990s. Greeted with controversy, today it has become the symbol of a local soccer team and is part of the town’s proudly defended landscape. If you got the community to participate, as many artists do and many critics hope for, you would have a shared work, but generally I think it can benefit no one except to appease certain reactionary moods or to satisfy the ideology of political correctness. Artwork cannot be blunted, measured, bargained for just to coincide with the taste of someone criticizing on Facebook. My practice, in a public context, is often to simply repurpose an image, an existing document, that the context itself had created. The slogan I presented was designed by a famous company in Siena that represented the city itself for so many. I just repurposed it, as a work of art. Instead.
SF. Your speech has been subjected to a form of censorship by city institutions. In the last few weeks I have wondered if we had committed levity; fatigue made me fragile as if I had little resistance to the wind. Then, slowly, the wise words of an old woman made their way into my memory, “the wind cannot be resisted, by the wind you let it caress you, by the wind you let it advise you.” And the wind has driven me here.
The intervention is temporarily visible in the entrance of the Palazzo Chigi Zondadari Foundation in Siena, thanks to the sensitivity and willingness of Flavio Misciattelli. A precious and intimate Salon des Refusés that allows anyone to enjoy your work, directly from the street, without any constraints. An intervention that urges us to change our way of seeing, inviting us to reflect on time, memory and identity with the poetry that distinguishes Flavio Favelli’s work.
In a historical period such as the one we are living through, filled with superficiality, arrogance, and oversight, what is the responsibility and sensitivity of the artist called upon to intervene in a public space?
FF. We are in a populist period. Which means that all it takes is one comment addressed to the social profile of a politician or a newspaper that a controversy is triggered, the great spectre of governments and industry that would like a society that is a kingdom of harmony, a term cherished and pursued, for example, by the People’s Republic of China. But a trait of free thought and conscious art is also controversy; the tongue beats where the tooth hurts, and this instead of being viewed with interest, is firmly rejected, on the right as well as the left. Above all, there is no courage, no one who simply says one thing: art is art and must be defended. Instead it is precisely politics, composed of too simple and inadequate people, that reads the work in a superficial and literal way, just as the person on the street does.
SF. Your poetics explores the relationship between past and present through the use of furniture or everyday objects that evoke the environments of your childhood and growing up. A necessity that starts from your personal history to reflect on the broader social and political dimensions of our country. The intervention made for “Assisting the Darkness” addresses one of the recurring themes in your work: the advertising image that becomes memory, history and identity of a place. Can you tell me about it in more detail?
FF. Italy, in addition to being the Land of Toys, is the Land of Carosello. And Carosello showed the great ambiguity of Italian culture toward merchandise and money. Despite the fact that the country has always been a land of merchants, markets, stores and big business, out of a kind of postwar and catto-communist modesty, the product and the merchandise were viewed with suspicion, with embarrassment, so the advertisement was presented as a skit played by great actors and only at the end did the product appear, as if it were there by chance. But as they say, things removed sooner or later show up again. And there came Mike Bongiorno, one of the fathers of the country, and then the New Man and shopping tips. Advertising, often done by prominent creatives, is a part of Italian culture, but it has always been snubbed, to make people believe that they actually follow higher and more spiritual values. Too many times creatives, designers, entrepreneurs and collectors talk about themselves as if they were spiritual fathers, as if they were concerned with immaterial things. Instead, the product, all the more so food, is an interweaving of history and identity that evoke images and thoughts and trace our histories. The slogan I wanted to put on the lamppost simply describes the city through food, because food, besides being one of the pillars of Italian identity, is one of the country’s obsessions.
SF. For your piece, you chose to show the advertising slogan of a well-known company producing panforte, a Sienese sweet related to the Christmas season, which reads, “Chi dice Palio dice Siena, chi dice Panforte dice Sapori.” Founded in Siena in 1832 by an intuition of Virgilio Sapori, the company has been one of the most important production hubs in the area, conveying the city’s image to the world through its confectionery production. For the past 20 years, the city has been orphaned of one of its prominent economic activities, which has moved elsewhere.
The use of this slogan is the motivation for the non-acceptance of your intervention, accused of becoming a form of publicity towards the brand, which, by the way, you agreed not to mention, removing it from your executive project: “Chi dice Palio dice Siena, Chi dice Panforte dice....” What is the difference between your intervention and a mere advertising message and when art, as such, has the power to transform any image and/or object, thanks to its investigation?
FF. There is a great lack of sensitivity toward art: you want to bring everything back to concrete matters, you want simple answers and you want to know a clear meaning of the work, perhaps with the sole purpose of making easy controversy. And it seems to me that in Siena, as in Tuscany, places of robust people who sometimes believe they are still living in the Renaissance and have the same blood in their veins as Duccio da Buoninsegna, it is particularly difficult. And so the institution wants to preserve this kind of fable of the “great past” where everything is in harmony, as it once was and “beautiful.” Beauty that then produces nothing but an endless commodity of products to sell that draw from this fable. My artwork reveals a concept, a worldview that has represented and represents the city. It reveals an idea that has represented a spirit for years. Perhaps with this operation we have only now realized, as it reads in a different way, its true meaning? By presenting it in a different context and elevating it to a work of art, it has displaced common sense. It is not known whether the municipality or the Superintendence were surprised by this or did they, like good family men, use the ban to protect a citizen who would perhaps have been upset? Do these authorities think that the citizen of Siena is so unlettered? Or simply grumpy?
My work is not an advertisement, it is a work of art, because the artist, in his practice, presents works of art, and since I have been invited, as an artist, to make a work of art, the one I present cannot be anything but a work of art: I declare it as an artist. Anyone who mistakes it for something else is an uninformed subject. The document censuring the work names it as an “inappropriate element incongruous with the context.” But this judgment can only be sustained by a subject, despotic and reactionary, which has no reason to exist in a Western democracy as the Italian Republic is. Besides the fact that the work takes up precisely the typical character used by Sapori, in perfect “Sienese style,” the duty of the work of art to be “congruous with the context” can only be an obligation of a dictatorial and illiberal country.
SF. Borrowing part of the title of Carole Talon-Hugon’s essay on art, ethics and militant censorship, is art under control?
FF. Under control, as the author says, by political correctness, which translates art in a literal way exactly as the institution and politics does. After all, art proposes a subtle game, but not everyone wants to play.
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Assisting the dark is a collective public art project, but it is also a new geography of the city that calls us to a more intimate, unexpected, different look. Assisting the dark illuminates a different Siena, offering a new experience, with a deeper connection to the urban context and the very soul of the city.
Assisting the Darkness conceived and curated by Serena Fineschi is a project promoted by Rotary Club Siena and realized with the patronage and contribution of the Municipality of Siena; the support of Opera Laboratori and Palazzo delle Papesse; the contribution of Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena within the Let’s Art! notice; the collaboration of Banca Centro Toscana Umbria; Estra Spa; Intesa; Terrecablate; Canestrelli Petroli; Blucar Siena.
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