Update October 2021

In relation to what happened in Colleverde, namely the act of vandalism suffered by artist Tatsiana Pagliani’s mural…

Art is for Art, it does not mean being indifferent to life. For, art is life and can never be detached from it. When I say that Art is not biased, I simply say that Art rather than reasoning in terms of opposites, reasons in terms of relationships. And relationships are of many kinds. Bateson and the Palo Alto School had mainly identified two in their studies (see the text Naven, written in 1936 by Gragory Bateson and Margaret Mead). Complementary ones (master/servant) and symmetrical ones (exponential competition). When taken to extremes, these interactions that have comulative patterns result in the degeneration of a system (cell,man,city ). There is then, however, a third choice, which is that of reciprocity, in which the schismogenetic processes are kept in balance, allowing the system not to degenerate. And it is this third choice that I (like Gragory Bateson I make fall within the scope of Art. That is, there are cultural devices that allow the parties in the field to dialogue/compete without necessarily degenerating. The game, the ritual, the humor, the art for that matter. Education to a view of life that sees sacrifice, suffering, and competition as the only ways of being in the world produces degenerate systems if not counterbalanced by a teaching of pleasure, desire, and beauty. This, as obvious, does not necessarily mean educating about art history, since, science, math, like soccer, are worthy of equal importance if inscribed in this cathartic dimension of stemming, defusing the fuse.

It is in this context that my mural is inscribed.