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Only one therapy, only one therapy
Only one therapy, only one therapy
They will come on the counterattack with new helmets and weapons
They will come on the counterattack but meanwhile now
Cure me, cure me, cure me
Cure me, cure me, cure me
Curami, by CCCP
What follows is a conversation conducted between Milan and Venice. It has no absolute truth to dispense. It is just an exchange of opinions between two artists and friends who deal with similar themes in their research, albeit in different ways.
Giuseppe Di Liberto: I’d start our exchange by recalling an episode of Radio 3 Scienza broadcast in spring 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic, in which Carlo Rovelli, a quantum physicist, presented his book The Order of Time, which attempts to explain what time is. Rovelli focused on the final chapter, “The Sister of Sleep”, delving into the theme that will be the guiding thread of our discussion, namely that of death, a metaphor for the end and the chronological obstacle of human time. He quoted the third book of the great Indian epic: “Every day countless people die, yet those who remain live as if they were immortal” and then continues “I would not like to live as if I were immortal, death does not frighten me, I am afraid of suffering, of old age. … I think of death as a well-deserved rest, in the wonderful cantata BWV 56 Bach calls her the sister of sleep, a gentle sister who will soon come to close my eyes and caress my head”. All this, in my opinion, is an excellent starting point with respect to the topics we will discuss. And who better to introduce the topic than Rovelli?!
Lorenzo Montinaro: I find the quote from Rovelli very on-point. I think that at least once in their lives the idea of being immortal has crossed the mind of all human beings, if only for a second. Jankélévitch spoke of the “sophism of hope”: coming to believe that you are that rare exception, that reprieve from the laws of life that are indeed the laws of death. The biggest problem with this macro-theme is the individual’s attitude towards himself. For the human being, the end of his own existence coincides with the end of everything, of history, of the universe. We tend to think of death as something distant, light years away, and we procrastinate any thought of it, whenever it raises its head. I’m thinking of a scene in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, in which the main character says: “Nothing makes us so alive as seeing others die”.
GDL: On this, I believe that the real fear of death is the terror of the disappearance of one’s image from history, of the cancelling out of our temporary effigy, an immaterial boundary that, in life, weighs like a boulder. The image of the dead person becomes a medium,[1] thus bearing witness to the lived history. It is no coincidence that photography was invented in order to “trap” the imago on a paper trail that could testify to the real existence of that person for future generations. From ancient monuments to Etruscan and Roman portraits, from the use of sculptural casts to the importance of cerae pictae.[2]
LM: Albert Speer’s theory of the “value of ruins” (Ruinenvert) comes to mind, here. According to his thinking, all the buildings put up by the Nazi regime had to be constructed using only natural materials. In this way, hundreds and thousands of years later, everything that had been built would turn out as aesthetically perfect ruins. Speer was sharply criticised by Hitler’s collaborators: in proposing this type of architecture, he somehow presaged the end of the Nazi regime. The Führer, on the other hand, was ecstatic: what better way to stand the test of time than through majestic monuments that reflected the “grandeur” of the Third Reich, on a par with the great Greek and Roman buildings? This story, however, pushes us a step further. What if death was not the end of everything but the beginning of something much bigger? Lars Von Trier in Jack’s House speaks of the “noble” mould and its decadent nature that, through decomposition, ennobles grapes, raising them to the level of fine dessert wines.Alberto Burri, with his Grande Cretto in Gibellina, provides the clearest of evidence that time, destruction or demolition are capable of monumentalising loss.
In doing so, the places of trauma, pain and death became the starting point for one of the most intense works of art ever created, a living wound.
GDL: Anything that remains, as you say, has been conceived by those who remain. I am thinking of the project of the Lu Cafausu collective: La festa dei vivi che riflettono sulla morte [The celebration of the living who reflect on death], a reflection that is a task for the living, but is subjected to their own censorship, addressed as an insurmountable taboo. Today, following medical and pharmaceutical developments, contemporary society finds it difficult to talk about death, it wants to live forever. From the newest experiments, such as cryogenics[3] — often present in the animated series Futurama — to genetic reprogramming through gene therapy, a project under development, capable of extending the life of some lab animals.
LM: But getting back to the question of the photographic medium, I’m very interested by what you said. For example, the photoceramics on gravestones are a clear example of how the image manages to activate and incorporate the physical presence of the deceased. I think of one of the episodes that influenced my work: walking around the Tamburi cemetery in Taranto, I came across a burial ground, probably devastated by an act of vandalism or simple carelessness. There were fragments of gravestones everywhere, whole boxes of photo ceramics no longer traceable to the grave they belonged to. I soon realised that I was in a field of the anonymous. These people had lost their identity simply by removing a 12 x 9 cm photo on a piece of marble. From then on, relatives who went to bring a flower to their loved one would be giving it to a stranger.
GDL: We are both from southern Italy and here, the idea of choosing which image best reflects the character and the person is at the heart of everything. You mentioned photo ceramics, but in the history of medieval representation, the power of images mediated messages in function of a good death. For example, through the Ars moriendi,[4] people prepared themselves spiritually and mentally for the end. In an article published by Iconografie del XXI secolo, there was a focus on how today’s warriors “martyred” in the Middle East are depicted as religious icons. That aesthetic, which is almost kitsch and baroque, is not far removed from some funerary representations in Catania, Palermo or Naples. These thus become media content, real trends, produced by some Tik Tok users. What Ernesto De Martino theorised in the mid-20th century, i.e. the ancestral funeral rituals in Grecìa Salentina, now takes on a “social media” character. This new mode of mourning and grief-sharing combines neo-melodic music and images of processions in memory of the dead. Whereas a few decades ago, mourning was understood as subjective suffering — Gorer analyses it impeccably in The Pornography of Death — today, through these media, some users in Sicily or Naples enact a hyper-sharing of grief, a sort of collective atonement. In my opinion, this is all a result of the impossibility of physical contact (the last goodbye), born during COVID-19.
LM: In all these videos you refer to, indeed, there is a kind of spectacularisation of death and grief. What I notice, in terms of the behaviour of the viewers of this kind of content, is that no one is ever really shocked by the moments before and after death, regardless of the violence or the extraordinariness of the manner in which it takes place. People have no difficulty at all in watching a video in which a man is suffocated by two policemen, and still less in seeing the content you mentioned, in which the funeral cult is taken to such extremes that the intimacy of suffering, typical of these moments, seems to dissolve to nothing. What continues to disturb, however, is the vision of a dead body, of a corpse, almost as if it were there to give us a foretaste of what we will become. Perhaps the only antidote to this lies in dwelling on the death and pain of the other. Perhaps we would come to realise that this long march that is life is not a mystery to be solved or a task to be completed, but an experience to be experienced, in which to delve into the dark, in search of the light: our last breath will give a newborn child the air it needs to exhale its first breath. I’ll conclude by referring to what Carmelo Bene argued, namely that human beings are born already dead. But if we are already born as “Death”, then it is death itself that dies when we leave this world. And so, my friend, long die death!
GDL: In the light of all the observations made, I ask myself: by what means will the image that will remain in history be propagated? Are we really interested in passing on our icon into the future, to continue to feel alive even when we are dead? I would like to conclude this fine dialogue by quoting a verse by the Rome trapper Ketama126, which reflects contemporary feelings about the eternal end:
I could’ve been a dead junkie
Instead, I’m a rich junkie
When I get to forty I’ll melt the gold disc
But who knows if I’ll make it
Bibliographical references
C. Rovelli, The Order of Time, Allen Lane, 2018
V. Jankélévitch, La Mort, Flammarion, 2017 [1966]
H. Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, Princeton University Press, 2011
A. Warburg, The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie, 1902
G. Gorer, The Pornography of Death, 1955
J. von Schlosser, History of Portraiture in Wax, 1911
A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995
E. Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture, Harry Abrams, 1964
L. Marin, On Representation, Standford University Press, 2002
Various authors, “Pattern. Sui rituali del XXI secolo”, in Iconografie. Centro Studi Sul XXI Secolo, I, 2021, III
E. De Martino, Morte e pianto rituale, Einaudi, 2021
[1] That which makes an image visible and allows it to be transmitted. There is no image without a medium to support it, and this assumption does away, according to Belting, with the distinction between mental images (those of memory) and material ones (a photograph, a sculpture).
[2] Masks and images of the deceased made of wax were brought to funeral ceremonies, or kept in the foyer of the house together with those of ancestors. The name came from the custom of enlivening sculptures and bringing them closer to natural reality.
[3] Technology that aims to make it possible, in future, to bring people back to life and possibly cure them using advanced scientific procedures. It consists of lowering the body temperature of people declared legally dead to the temperature of liquid nitrogen within half an hour of death. The decomposition stops.
[4] The Art of Dying: generic title of Latin writings on the preparation for a good death, which had an enormous circulation in 15th century Europe.
