BEYOND THE LIMIT
Lea Vergine

Maybe “RHUMA” is a nightmare but you cannot wake up. And you are not supposed to.
Delicate and subdued creature to whom it seems that a way of concrete way of existence has been denied.
Libera Mazzoleni carries out her experiences with a determination that reminds us of the violence of the meek. She addresses everyone, even simple people who have proved their love of the world of images: especially in this most recent work “ Rhuma eritis Sicut Dei” (2004/2005) made from two hundred and sixty squares of different fabrics across which runs a text in acrylic paint.
Here we have a geography of horror, of the misdeeds of war, of the crushing and excluding forces. A set of answers to themes and arguments that are brought to our consciousness through the field of politics.
Mazzoleni condemns and puts on display clues and proof of the cruelty of real experience. She unfolds an intelligent and sorrowful denunciation of human madness, of how horrendous someone who is dangerous to himself and to others can be. She does it like a preacher who knows how to use rhetorical figures to full effect.
On the painting we read the words: “Scorpion – Atlantic 21.5.68, Chernobyl – 26.4.86, Dubrovka Theater - Moscow 23.10.02, Genpatsu-Gypsies-Mihama Japan 9.8.04”; all intense references, exemplary in their atrocity.
With great simplicity of means, Mazzoleni strikes out at false ideologies and, especially, at pharisee-like indignation. She sees the sign, drawing and color beyond all limitations and this allows her to reaffirm the natural bond between painting and civil protest. But it also permits her to achieve an integration of her visual creativity with the complexity of historical testimony. Thus she restores to the painter’s role that density of allusions that emphasize how his/her vocabulary is important not only for what it affirms but also for what it denies.

IN THE NAME OF RHUMA: Libera Mazzoleni's "shroud-banners"
Eleonora Fiorani

The broken life of little Rhuma, a four-year-old Afghan girl victim of organ trafficking, is remembered in the title of Libera Mazzoleni's most recent work in progress: Rhuma, Eritis sicut Dei 2004-2005. The artwork is made up of 260 squares of colored fabric on which she has written the names and dates of the tragic events that marked the twentieth century.Writing has always been present in Libera Mazzoleni's art; she uses it in its double quality as drawing and sign, as form and communication. This choice has to do with the body; it comes from the making and observation of handprints, from the moment one leaves a sign of oneself. It doesn't originate from words themselves but from visual experience. It inhabits the multidimensional expansive quality of space. At the same time it recalls the rhythmic verbal motility while it is, in itself, rhythm, a pure pulsing that settles and becomes incarnate through signs. It is a trace, no different than the impressions left by the things and bodies - such as the hand and footprints - that have been found in prehistoric sanctuary-grottos. Even today these signs fascinate us through their polysemy and abstraction; they are pure gazes which Man turns on himself. In Rhuma the typographical lettering and use of capitals is characterized by an aseptic, cold appearance; thus the writing underlines the irrevocability and enormity of events which can only begin to be told in the silence of marks and in the language of color. The subdued, congealed, concentrated way of saying something enclosed in a name and a date is all that is left of countless broken lives, of shattered relations and of the whole set of events that changed, and are still changing, our life and the life of the world. Thus Hiroshima and Chernobyl, genocide in Ruwanda and the collapse of the Twin Towers are placed alongside small lives like Rhuma's and all the others who have not yet found a name and a date except in the hearts and memory of those who loved them.
Pure names and dates are given a form via a gesture. For precisely this reason they spread across the surface giving a deeper significance to words, once more affirming its own apotropaic value/quality, interrogating the names and their ability to evoke and narrate. The names are written in acrylic paint on squares of fabric that the artist has collected on her travels or found in her home. She has carefully cut the canvas, cotton, silk, and linen to make them into material, a skin on which to inscribe her work. Poor and precious textiles are placed one next to the other, each one with its different colors and patterns, with its history and culture concentrated in its own being. With the writings they become a kind of loculus, to form a wall that recalls the Wall of Tears in Jerusalem or the Holocaust Memorial in Libeskind's Hebrew Museum in Berlin. But they are also banners and signs which do not possess the presumption of stone but rather the grace of the ephemeral and the feminine. In fact fabrics are the "most human" materials, the ones most similar to the female side of Mankind, because they share the fragility and character of beings in their own time which aren't made to last. They are the materials that are closest, bodily, to Man who dresses in them as if they were a second colored, patterned and decorated skin with many tactile values. They are the first dress that greets the child into his community and they are the shroud that accompanies us after death. They divide daily life from the time of celebrations, the rituality of the sacred from the representation of reality. They belong to the female realm while also being the visible aspect of the values and dreams of different cultures.
In this way Rhuma recounts the last century, pointing out its wounds (all open) as well as the atrocities to which it has never been called to account; the artwork catalogues the stories not only to keep them alive but also to open another gaze on us and on the world. An unveiling, it calls each one of us personally to face our responsibilities/ to act. It outlines a new geography, one that has slipped through the holes in the net, beyond the enticing curtain of mass-media communications.In the intricate contemporary view of things Rhuma is also a way of rethinking artistic creativity; the relationship between artwork and reality has changed through operations conceived to interact with a certain context (sometimes even involving the public, building narrations through dialogue) and through art’s critical position - or inner ethical need - to speak out. (Duchamp introduced this with his deconstructions in which the ready-made, rather than build art, pointed its finger at the ever closer and unmediated relationship between art and reality or life). In Libera Mazzoleni's work this rethinking re-posits the value of art as a civic passion, as a "poiesis", a doing-speaking that recovers the being and the meaning of things. A subdued speech, made more of silence than of cries, that testifies in the first person; a speech of pietas (pity) for the pain, the nearness and sensitivity to the victims' world. Thus the pinks, reds, greens, yellows and light blues which recur throughout the squares to the west progressively leave space to the browns and blacks to the east of violence towards women, underlining the darker and more twisted side of history and the human soul.

I HAVE A DREAM…
Lorella Giudici

218 squares of fabric -- each one different in color and content, and yet so damned similar in shape and meaning – recite their long and melancholy rosary: Shuttle, Cape Canaveral 28.2.1986; Sarno, Avellino 5.5.1998; Pluto, Cuba 17.4.1961; Pepe, Argentina 29.1.1979; Sharm El Sheik, Egypt 22.7.2005….
In an endless litany they string together, one after another, the names of cities, countries and places in the world only to be followed, in an imperative and irrevocable manner, by a tragic divinatory cabala, cold series of numbers: the days of a time past whose traces, in spite of the terrible events that occurred, wind up getting lost in the meanders of memory.
Each one of these textile squares is a group epitaph of men and women who are no longer. Thousands of lives swept away, not so much and not only, by sudden natural catastrophes, by unforeseeable and unfortunate accidents, but especially by human stupidity and cruelty: the primary motives responsible for all this ruination.
Each one of these cloth pieces which we imagine have caught, metaphorically, the hot tears of mourning, has become a sign on an oppressive calendar, on a bulletin which, for Libera Mazzoleni, is the representation of Rhuma, of the true face of the Western World.
In any case it is as if the pieces possessed a dual nature. On one hand, the stiff lettering, set down with characters used in military dispatches, list – and thus coldly and unbearably summarize one after another – events which sometimes no longer have limitations or names that inevitably remain without faces. But in their humble and concise enunciation these become a heavy weight, they are the heralds of lugubrious tidings. On the other hand their Harlequin-like checkered pattern speaks of life, not death, and leads to dreams, to searching for a way out, to hoping for a better world. This is not a wall of tears but a collage of emotions, not an end but a beginning. “I have a dream,” writes Libera, on the book flap.
It is neither rhetoric nor nihilism, but rather a lucid investigation that has always led Libera Mazzoleni to pay particular attention to a certain education via art, to believe in a work that relays messages and values to the collectivity; her work takes upon itself the complexity of real experience, the wealth of thought that comes from the certainty that life is not prevarication but dialogue, not violence but freedom (a destiny marked also in its name!).
Those 2209 square centimeters of cloth (this is the dimension of each panel) want to make us more aware of the world’s evils but also strive to weave a conversation with our consciences. Especially that brightly colored puzzle of memories aspires to render a new level of respect for life, through death. It is from the recognition of the importance of existence that good is born and, as Foscolo teaches, from the memory and devotion to the dead that one understands the maturity, the greatness and the future of a civilization.

MEETING RHUMA IN THE EMPATHETIC SILENCE OF LISTENING
Graziella Longoni

“The Hell is empty, all the devils are up in the world.”

W. Shakespeare, The Tempest

“What is much more worrying is that we are not yet
capable of arriving, through meditative thought,
at an adequate comparison with what is in reality
emerging in our era.”

M. Heidegger, L’abbandono

“Rhuma”: painful mosaic, fragile in the lightness of the fabrics that compose it; a tragic map of devastated places, of terrible times, of existences among ruins; topography of a world where death ceaselessly repeats its cold annihilating gesture….
An essential language, almost miserly, made up of only names and dates, marks the individual inlay tiles; it arranges them like the titles of a long and difficult story evoking the folly of hubris of those who, wanting to “live beyond the proper time and measure, lose their minds” (Sophocles) and fall into the most ruinous foolishness.
“Rhuma” breaks down the wall of indifference which keeps us insensible in the face of the infinite pain which is brought into the world by devilish temptations of omnipotence. It denounces the paralyzing apathy derived from a thought pattern of conformism, incapable of empathy, which condemns whole populations to the condition of “superfluous beings”, denying their belonging to human society.
“Rhuma” tells the unspeakable about the nihilistic passion which ravages the earth, making it into a threatening and unlivable place; it speaks of the absurdity of wars, of bodies dissolved by the phosphorous of “intelligent bombs”, bodies offended and deformed by torture, devastated by rape, contaminated by radiation and condemned to slow throes of death, living bodies reduced to assemblages of organs to be extracted and sold; it tells of the crimes against humanity carried out in the name of whoever has the most power as well as of genocides repeated but always denied, of mass graves, ethnic cleansing, hatred that divides people in the name of blood, identity, values, religions, cultures.
Libera Mazzoleni remembers and writes a history that brings the offended human subject back to a central position; a history that captures mute suffering as seen in the gaze of the dying other, vulnerability as it is cried out from the wounds inflicted on the flesh of her living body as well as in the mind which vacillates under such desperation.
A woman’s eyes opened wide on the world, a nomad gaze that doesn’t linger on the shining surface of things destined to be consumed but is always on the move, traversing the darkness that envelops calculation and creates a “world-machine” to infinitely manipulate mankind.

Libera Mazzoleni, a woman, an artist, composes her mosaic within a circle of empathy, that is she allows herself to see and to hear the other, to take the other upon herself, restoring a voice and dignity, participating emotionally in history, in the awareness that living means “being in relation.”
Her work gives visibility to the dark side of Cartesian reasoning which takes bodies to be without anima, thereby an anonymous set of organs and apparatuses; she recalls the fragility and vulnerability of the body which, as a “living body”, is always with us, presenting us to the world as incarnate subjects which are traversed by strong emotions and deep passions.
This is the rediscovery which suggests gestures of empathy such as solicitude, care, respect for the fragility that characterizes human beings as well as for what has been entrusted to us, living.
Edith Stein said: ”The world in which I live is not only a world of physical bodies: in it there are, apart from me, subjects that live and I know about this life (...A) psychophysical individual (...) is clearly different from a physical thing: it doesn’t present itself as a physical body but as a living, sensitive being that possesses an ego, an ego that receives, feels, wants; its living body is not only a part of my phenomenological world but is the very orientation center of some phenomenological world, it stands in front of it and enters with me in a relationship of reciprocity.”
Aesthetics and empathy share their mutual roots in “feeling” and this reminds us of the “perceptive body”, of the “living body”, always in contact with others who announce themselves in the expression of a face which always bears signs of the life lived.
Libera Mazzoleni, following this sense of aesthetics, takes her artistic creation into the heart of the world inhabited by men and women “in flesh and blood”; she deconstructs the mad narrations told by those who call war “humanitarian responsibility”, civilian dead “collateral effects”, environmental disasters “the price of progress”; she shows up the cracks, the scraps, the fractures and she does so without rhetoric.
She uses the essential vocabulary of colors, brightening or darkening; she exposes the nudity of names and dates drawn in the fragments of simple textiles, juxtaposed to form a different syntax able to suggest new connections of meaning between events.
In the absorbed silence of someone who is listening, in that silence which belongs to meditating thought, the artist, “re-remembers” the vulnerability and precarious quality of human existence; she dreams of and asks for a new beginning when men and women, who walk together on the same earth and share the same fragile destiny, can reciprocally recognize each other and learn to take care of everything that has been placed in their care, living.
may 2006.

AMONG THE WRINKLES OF REPRESSED EXPERIENCE
Rossella Moratto

Two-hundred and eighty colored cloths cover a wall, like a composite and variegated tapestry: Harlequin-type combinations of different kinds of fabric, from precious brocades to jute sackcloth, displayed like the textiles in an Eastern market.
The apparent sense of reassuring lightness that one receives at first glance is contradicted by the reading of the names, numbers, and dates printed on each fabric border. An extremely long sequence that recalls the horrors of our recent past. Thus the cloths become tombstones and the polychrome wall a cemetery: as bare, precarious and rotten as the cloth making up the samples.
Human poverty and violence flow before our eyes, a long list that evokes necropoli and celebratory monuments but without any of that impressive sacrality that sets these mournful places apart: Rhuma is an ephemeral and nomadic memento mori, unfortunately undergoing constant revision. It is an historical inventory in which the facts are rigorously represented by a name and date and by a number that allows us to look up an explanatory caption that succinctly describes the event.
Rhuma is a troublesome work: the multicolored whole seems at first sight to delight us but then leaves us faint, to contemplate either collective or individual disaster, it matters little. Every formal element is essential and functional to the expression of content. The inscriptions were stenciled on and one can sometimes find traces of this on the cloth. The lack of a search for perfection in the artwork’s realization is hardly casual but formally translates into the absence of value attributed by our society to everything that cannot be transformed into immediate profit.
It is a simple iconography, a sign left on an abandoned place that bears witness to an event or commemorates a person: memories that are as fragile and perishable as the existences named in the epigraphs; names that are cut and dry and, for this reason, are all the more powerful.
In the inflation of images in our world where daily transmitted violence is by now almost invisible, filtered out by our bombarded perception, Libera Mazzoleni chooses not to show but simply to write the abuses of power, the brutality and exploitation perpetrated on men, women, children, society, environment. A direct denunciation, with no punches pulled, using these pieces of cloth. Cloth is an ordinary, domestic material, tied to the female domain as it is tied to daily life: clothing, sheets, kerchiefs, flags, shrouds but also tents, refuges, homes and also involucra, sacks, suitcases. These are not textiles that have been woven and decorated for the occasion but rather recycled samples: the waste produced by a society (of which we are a part and of which we are co-responsible) which, with its insane practice of conquest and exploitation, leaves only garbage in its wake.
In this way, by picking up the leftovers, Libera Mazzoleni leaves a sign, a discrete testimony that declares the need to take a critical position with regards to what is existing now, as well as the will to give a social and political value back to art. A choice that the artist has been carrying forward for years, together with her active militancy in the association “Donne in Nero” (Women in Black), an international network against wars.
Rhuma is a work-in-progress that began in 2004, a survey from the last century down to our current time and beyond: wars, massacres, ecological disasters , violence against people, thefts and pillage, mass repressions, deportations, avoidable accidents and ridiculous projects that herald imminent, future catastrophes. The artwork’s title refers to one among many episodes, but a particularly hateful one, and for this reason it has been chosen as the emblem of this tragic catalogue of events. It is the name of an Afghan girl, only four years old, who fell victim to the black market trading of organs; she was killed to provide body parts for other humans.
Any other comment is superfluous, all that is left is space for thought and this is what makes Rhuma an example of a social art, with neither rhetoric nor self-congratulation, urgent and relevant now more than ever.

Uneasiness that originates from pressing questions that have no answers.
Libera Mazzoleni

Once the purely formal elements of artistic language fascinated me, the course of a line, the tension of a development, its relationship to color. It seemed to me that, in some way, these elements expressed something about the unexplainable happening of existence. I was moved by works which, with poetic simplicity and instinctive immediacy, revealed their relationship with their author’s inner life.
I have always feared my own inner life and never dared gaze into the abyss where dreams are submerged. I preferred to look outside myself, in the outer space, cadenced by the happening of events and lit by the brilliant light of day.
Then that “outside”, so invasive and noisy, became recollection, memory, intimate space; it wound up moving together with dreams into the boundless territory of inner life. Thus images, forms, colors, dreams became a pause in the uneasiness that originates from pressing questions that have no answers. Perhaps because modern man doesn’t want to have anything more to do with wonder, with the depth of secrets which throng along the thin line separating light from shadow, good from evil …to construct his identity he no longer needs to look to the stars, he prefers to amuse himself with infernal toys dominated by numbers and is seemingly content with exercising his power to destroy.
“…we sleep, indeed we sleep for fear of having to perceive the world around us … on one hand, inner life without conscience, dream …on the other, functionality, utilitarianism, pat phrases, so much violence.” (1)
War is not only the natural consequence of a market economy, it is also the most well-suited tool for carrying out the obliteration of life.
And so, what does art have to do with this? What for?
“By now, in this current state of affairs, we have, by dint of pressing consent, reached the point that Hermann Broch stigmatized with an irate phrase. No matter how you consider it, we have come to this point. ‘Morality is moral, business is business, war is war and art is art.’ ”
If we tolerate this, if we accept – pars pro toto – the formula : “Art is art” and its derisory tone … then that means we are declaring our failure …”(1)

(Ingeborg Bachmann: Domande e pseudodomande in “Letteratura come utopia” Lezioni di Francoforte, Questions and pseudoquestions in Literature as Utopia, Adelphi 1993)

To Gaia Cianfanelli and Silvia Litardi in Reply to their Questionnaire
Libera Mazzoleni

Gaia Cianfanelli and Silvia Litardi (Associazione Start), curators of the collective exhibition Dissertare/Disertare Write:

(...) So... "Turn every meaning upside down, back to front. Radically shake up meaning, take it back, put back into it those convulsions suffered by her 'body' which remains powerless to say what disturbs it. Moreover insist, and deliberately, on those voids of discourse that recall the places of her exclusion, white spaces which with their silent plasticity ensure the cohesion, the articulation and the coherent expansion of established forms.[...] Upset the syntax."

This passage is taken from "Speculum L'altra Donna" (Speculum. The Other Woman) by Luce Irigaray, a book which early on became a classic text for feminist thought. In 1974 the volume led to its author’s dismissal from her professorship at the University of Vincennes. Many years have passed since then and generations of artists have been formed, forged and have found identity in the theories put forth in the writings of Irigaray and other women scholars. What effect do these words have today? Have the voids of discourse and the white spaces been filled? And if so, in what way?
Will the women artists to whom we pose these questions dissertate or desert the field? How will this piece of our writing be accepted? What answers will it receive? (...) (Gaia Cianfanelli, Silvia Litardi)   

Libera replies:

Dissertare/Disertare  (Dissertate/Desert)
Looking these Italian words up in the dictionary we find: dis (orderly) sertare (dispose) ‘treat issues reflecting on them at length with great engagement and seriousness’, generally on philosophical problems since philosophy is the science where reason best finds a fitting environment. It is no chance that the term is also tied to : disertare (desert) désertare (destroy, devastate).

A fine contradiction. Is the theme proposed essential or non-essential?

Speculum and other texts have de-constructed, from within, the system which upheld psychoanalysis, philosophy, and science, bringing to light the misogyny of our patriarchal society which is based on the absolute dismissal of the female's otherness. The 1960s and ‘70s offered my generation an unprecedented critical and democratic stimulus, an impact that was reinforced by the issues present in the feminist movement.

I personally did not participate in the feminist movement but, thanks to this stimulus, in those years I was able to question what my life in the World meant, what was my relationship to other people and to things, what caused my unease in being a woman and being an artist.
Thanks to the chance of reading significant texts, I was able to find the words and the ways to bring together the two aspects of who I am, being a woman and being an artist, which might otherwise have remained separate or deadened inside a Single male Universe.
Thus in the dynamic line of my sculptures I was expressing my refusal of the abstract geometric view which was dominant at the time. A view which seemed to me to be a metaphor for a metaphysical conception of the World; the words and gestures of my performances allowed me to translate my opposition to the androcentric vision that permeated culture.

An Ancient Tradition
We are heirs to the Greek world which recognized gender difference but with the sole aim of affirming male superiority over the female and condemning women to silence.
It confined female features to the closed, private space of the house, the Oikos, where every day women lived in contact with bodies and took care of others. Meanwhile men's space was the open Polis, the place of discourse and reason which define man's power.

In Euripides' tragedy, there is a page of superb and dramatic beauty in which Medea the SAPIENTE  speaks of woman's condition in the Greek world. I find her speech to be greatly emblematic. It is discomforting to think her words still regard over 2/3 of the women in our world today. In  Afghanistan, in recent months, ninety young women have set themselves on fire to escape the fate of slavery to which they are condemned under patriarchal law.1

Western Culture
Patriarchal Law, sanctified by religion, is the tradition which gives rise to metaphysical thought; the scission of sky and earth, soul and body, rational and irrational, is the most complete metaphor of that ancient separation. From Plato's "World of Ideas" down to Descartes' "cogito", Western culture has promulgated a sunny, Apollonian rationality. This, in turn, has established the abstract realm of the Universal as separate from concrete, lively and living detail; it has vilified bodily existence, identifying it as a shadowy realm of female qualities, of maternity, passion and hysteria.
It is exactly this original separation -- which carries within it the cancellation of the female, the body, the detail, the sense of limits, of life in its concrete manifestation, the model -- which has generated a violent society; a sick society because it is incapable of hearing the Other's arguments, of living alongside diversity and of seeing in it the normal expression of existence. Carol Patmann has said, "The first aggression is the one between the sexes, next comes the one between roles."

In “dissertate/desert" the question is posed, "Have the voids of discourse and the white spaces been filled? And if so, in what way?"

I read in an interview, "Gender difference is no longer an issue for thought and we can no longer talk about sexist emargination since we are living, for the first time in the history of art, in a period of equal representation, on the Western artistic scene, of men and women…” (L.Barreca)
If I am not mistaken, the "official investiture" of an artist occurs just before she/he breathes his last (and here the exception does not make the rule).
One should also ask why, in Italy, a law is needed to impose a twenty percent quota of female political candidates. Perhaps something isn't working right in the heads of the "democratic" Italian males? In any case one cannot deny that, today, women have acquired civil rights together with a debatable equality inherent in that ambiguous term of "equal opportunity".

But are the equal opportunities the ones that would fill the voids of discourse, the white spaces? Does equal opportunity, per se, fit with women's emancipation?

If an automatic connection existed between enjoying rights and liberation, everything would be all set, there wouldn't be any more problems.
Today women have left the private space of the house to enter the public domain, they can have careers, enroll in the army, torture prisoners, be artists, fly bomber planes, in brief they can do everything a man can do, in the West.

But what if women do not possess an awareness of their difference lived as incarnate subjectivity, a subjective experience which doesn't allow women to identify themselves with the pervasive nihilism of male omnipotence and its barbarities? In such a case, do equal opportunities, per se, fit in automatically with women's liberation or are they rather a modern form of homologation?
There cannot be liberation without freedom from the violence of the male stereotype which insists that it is the only way to define the human being.
Slaves, servants and lastly accomplices participating in equal opportunity but in a world reeling towards chaos that insists on imposing its one-way Order.

The Other Gaze
In their particular historical condition, women found themselves closely tied to the care for life, for bodies, for health and this allowed them to develop skills for accepting Others, for empathizing with the One different from Oneself, for keeping the space of relations open.
Women had continual contact with bodies within which life expresses itself as an individual presence, unique in the world; this allowed her outlook to preserve the unity of mind and body, heaven and earth, the detail and the universal.
She learned the ‘thought of Ambivalence’ which keeps One and the Other together; she learned to think with her heart but this experience of wholeness never became shared knowledge, never led to a culture capable of changing the male view of the world.
This ‘embodied way of thinking’, which is supposed to be a distinguishing feature of the female, knows enough to recognize the Earth as a horizon which cannot be transcended during of our stay in time; it is our only dwelling in this world. This ‘feminine knowledge’ is the awareness of limits and the tending towards the Other who is always defined by his unique features and not in the abstract quality of essence. This ‘original way of being’, which is expressed in the need to unite what is separated and distanced from the self by the pure will to dominate, this culture that stretches to build a weaving of pluralities is the antithesis of the Single Thought that freezes the world in its homologation where the Other can exist only as a replicant or as a pale copy.

But the West has remained blind to women’s gaze. The white spaces have not been filled and the World does not yet speak with two voices.
No one listened to Hanna Arendt when she said that not man, but men and women live on the earth and so plurality is our destiny.

Difficult Times
We live in difficult times. Totalitarianism today takes on different guises: in the form of homologation which kills conscience, in the cult of an alienated subjectivity, all contained in the individualistic self-centeredness, substantiated by loneliness and fear, covered by great quantities of useless objects, impoverished by the loss of ties of solidarity and hence barbarian and racist. Materialized from concepts, this subjectivity hides, behind the shining mask of globalization, ‘financial speculation, arms trafficking, drug dealing, the commerce of organs taken from the living and the dead, trafficking of waste.’ (2)

“...we sleep, indeed we sleep from fear of having to see the world around us... on the one hand, interiority without consciousness, dreams... on the other functionality, utilitarianism, pat phrases, much violence’. (3)

Art as a remedy for life
Something that contains its own reason for being is not the object of trends in avantguard periods.
This is the reason why I have continued to use that same outlook which led me to refuse an abstract and idealistic conception of art in favor of an expression rooted in my being a woman, painfully aware of living in a time closed against any imagination of the possible.
I fled from that way of being woman who believes she can find identity just by soul-searching, without realizing that she is trapped in a subjectivity alienated and detached from the world.
In myth, in tragedy, in what has been removed from Western culture, I have constantly sought the words and the actions to tell, in a woman’s way, of my passion for the world, of my living art as an unveiling of what is hidden and as a remedy for the ‘pain’ of life.
8 aprile 2005

(1) Euripide, ‘Medea’, i Classici Feltrinelli (v. 231/259 pag. 61)
(2) B. Amoroso, ‘Globalizzazione e criminalità’, Asterios
(3) I. Bachmann, ‘Letteratura come utopia.Lezioni di Francoforte’, Adelphi.