Z y g m u n t B a u m a n
P i e r r e B o u r d i e u
A m a r t y a S e n
The Polish sociologist represents the decisive meeting for the understanding of the sociologist's power in the artistic field. His “Media, spettatori, attori, short piece written in 2004, found way into my heart, making me change my working method.
In his words I caught the power of the vision and I realized that, as citizen, not only as an artist, I had to go beyond the individualism, that oppresses, and speak again in social terms.
Many of my projects bring their value from his thinking: the video installation Quasar and the video Not only off are connected to his work “media, spettatori, attori”, the installation Crolli liquidi i and the project Avvolti da pensieri reciproci are related to his thinking too.
I really went into the work of Pierre Bordieu “La Distinction” and especially into his book “Libre-Echange”, that has found the collaboration between artists and sociologists possible. This book was written in collaboration with Hans Haacke. Thanks especially to this studies I wrote my thesis “Incontri Inattesi – quando artisti e sociologi dialogano”, with which I graduated from university in 2009 and I decided to continue this idea in the contemporary art.
I shot a video called Getting-involved which is related to Bordieu's thinking.
Although he won a Noble Prize economics, Sen has got an incredible sociological perspective, that helped me to realize Varchi di incontro, one of the project I had more believed in. At the entrance of GameC (the modern art gallery of Bergamo), I placed the words of his book “Identity and Violence” on the stones that cover the gate of gallery. I put Sen's words on the gallery's doorway to highlight the importance, the centrality of contemporary art.
Patrizia Bonardi
Sociologists’s books inside my work
S t e p h a n e H e s s e l
The reading of “Indignez Vous” by Stéphane Hessel has been crucial in a climate of apathy, where the worst injustices seem part of the system, like inevitable drawbacks.
Hessel's main idea is the belief that we are able to move mountains using our indignation. We are a wave of disapproval that can defeat injustice.
An old wise man who died after 3 years from the publish of his incredible pamphlet, a last strong message about the ability of those who saw, lived and fought before us.
Hessel was one of the main authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights!
I gathered its “Indignez vous” in my solo exhibition in 2011, creating, on a wall about ten meters long, a wave of "NO" that stood out physically in the presence of "bandages of earth," where the beeswax couldn't heal the deep wound. But perhaps the real cure is the indignation itself, it's the “no” that comes out of the consciousness' solitude and opens up to find the sharing in a change project.
In that case, the wave of "NO" came from the video "Italian Factory", but how many social emergencies would need to indignation, to participation in a process of substantial change in the current economic and political system!
Hessel in 2010 wrote: "The public interest must prevail over the interest individual, the fair sharing of the wealth created by the world of work override the power of money”.
Translator Silvia Corna