work was mostly unknown. And the interpretation of my career you were able to suggest certainly also contributed to the show’s success. GDC ■ I was thinking that the apocalyptic themes you have constantly been tackling since 2011 in ever different ways are encountering, right in the midst of this dialogue of ours, a stunning confirmation in the ongoing pandemic. Rereading the history before the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the 1st century AD we see impieties of all kinds, wars, catastrophes, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, fires, dissolution of the laws of Nature. It seems that the wisemen called them “the Messiah’s birthing pains”. So Nulla succede per la prima volta / Nothing happens for the first time, just as the title of perhaps your most crucial work suggests? It is difficult to imagine what will happen now, after “La Grande Bouffe” of the past thirty years. Hell is quantity versus quality, promiscuity versus individuality, repetition versus difference, excess versus moderation, abuse versus legitimacy, din versus silence, and so much more. Can we once again defend the values of humanity, awareness, liberty, and spirituality? In 2011 you spoke with foresight of an “evolutionary end of homo oeconomicus” and his “passage towards homo jucundus”, but just how possible would that be? FV ■ Nothing happens a first time is a sentence that hammered in my brain ever since the 1960s and inspired the work I created during a poetic and anthropological reflection on the chaos created by the proliferation of “art” objects and “artists” of the globalist and colonial scene of the contemporary art system. I did the sculpture between 2011 and 2012. Now I felt the image of a sacrifice, an act of violence and rupture, the infraction of a limit had to be shown to both indicate and vindicate that culture and human sacrifice are the same thing. An act of revolt against the cultural phantasm proposed by the specialists of the contemporary arts collective consumption, recalling that ancient knowledge represented by the “poet’s sacrifice” that is repeated over and over in human culture. To step back into the limelight of his own history the artist, stripped of authority and expropriated of his own social role, must undergo the sacrifice of his own body. Only a few grasped the metaphor. They were content to observe, surprised and intrigued, the visual effect of a lacerated body. To understand it, maybe the countless interconnections between bodies in the characteristic mysticism of Nature might help. Yes, I agree, hell is quantity versus quality, promiscuousness versus individuality, repetition versus difference, excess versus moderation, din versus silence. In these years, in the revelry of consuming of which by now we were sated, every once in a while I hummed to myself Vecchioni’s El bandolero stanco: che se ne va dov’è silenzio, dov’è silenzio, dove. Now – because nothing, precisely, happens for the first time – the time has come to defend the values of humanity, awareness, freedom, spirituality. I am not sure that individually, faced with the usurper’s collapse right before our eyes, we shall be able to experience that awareness that does not need a divine scapegoat - as Norman O. Brown writes quoting Bataille, Blake, Nietzsche, Spinoza –, adding that “the grand Inquisitor” wagers that circuses
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