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Futuro Antico. Interview with Andrea Cortellessa
Apr 5, 2022
Marco Bassan
What nuances and peculiarities does the future hold in the eyes of a literary critic? The answer lies in this interview with Andrea Cortellessa (Rome, 1968), ranging from Burri to Pasolini to question the present and look toward tomorrow.
What are your inspirational references in art?
When I was 28, I saw a major Burri exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the year after his death. I was particularly struck by one of his works: a Ferro (Iron) that tears apart revealing, underneath, something organic and red. After many years, I saw that work again at the Fondazione Cini and was moved once more, but in a different way. This second encounter made me reflect on how certain works mark our lives, literally cutting it into pieces.
That Burri work represents for me what Michel Leiris might call a “breach”: certain works have this force, this violence, the ability to create a seam in reality that occasionally allows a glimpse of what cannot be seen. The other’s work is that breach for me, a wound that does not heal; you can try to understand it, rationalize it, interpret it (and if you are a critic, you have tools to do so), but you can never fully conceptualize it, anesthetize it. And it is that blood that continues to flow, like that of Saint Januarius, that keeps you alive in effect.
What project represents you the most? Can you tell us about its genesis?
“Why create a work when it’s so beautiful to only dream it?” says Pasolini in the guise of a pupil of Giotto in *The Decameron*. Prefacing that I have never considered myself capable of adding something to the world (according to the etymology of the word “author”), the only projects I care about are those I have not been able to realize, those that remain in the state of a project. Over the past twenty-five years, I have long cherished two dreams in the form of books (and when I use the outdated metaphor of cherishing, I certainly refer to an infinite engagement that has something masturbatory about it). These two projects were supposed to represent to myself what they respectively represented for me, my father and my mother. I can only name the ideal titles. The first, dedicated to my father, is called *War Tourists*; the second, which was born much later and is even more oblique and disrespectful in relation to my mother, is called *Mirrors, Death*. The first reflects an ideology from over twenty years ago that no longer belongs to me, I could never think of reviving it. The second is more recent and reflects quite a bit of my current way of being; but there are good chances, given the premises, that it too will remain an abortion. Which, considering the mistakes made by my mother starting with the mistake of bringing me into the world, seems to me the most appropriate fate for it.
What importance does the genius loci have for you in your work?
I would like to answer with the dryness with which Roberto Cuoghi did, namely “none.” In reality, for me, the reason is more banal: a critic, if they are truly a critic and not a disguised author, does not have a “own” place: the works they study and admire from time to time move them, drag them, relocate them. In an interview, Giorgio Manganelli, the author who has most influenced me, uses a nautical term, *vantage point*: the position of the lookout who always scans the horizon, beyond the objects that at times hide it. A position that requires constant movement: and it is precisely this movement that I ask of works. So there is no place, even though in the authors I study and love, I recognize how much the genius loci (to use this rightly debated term today) plays a part. The idea is that the critic is essentially someone who is taken for a walk. And this, from an existential point of view, satisfies me fully.
How important is the past for imagining and building the future? Do you think the future can have an ancient heart?
*Ancient Future* is a beautiful expression, even though *The Future Has an Ancient Heart* is the title of a book by Carlo Levi that I find quite questionable; there is no doubt, however, that the “non-contemporaneity of the contemporary,” to put it with Ernst Bloch, has become for me somewhat of an obsession in recent years. An obsession is that shapeless thing that, at a certain point in our journey, encounters that current of thought or that artistic object which finally gives it a form. From that moment on, we are led to reconsider our path backwards, with teleological superstition aiming at this vantage point that we thought we discovered but, in fact, discovered us.
This concept of non-contemporaneity is a key to reading that applies to much of modernity, certainly from Neoclassicism and Romanticism onwards. So certainly, the future is still ancient, to put it with an author closer to me, Emilio Villa: “The time has come to throw this great bridge over the past, which means over the future.” Villa studied not only the art of the past, as a mirror of the “contemporary,” but also what he called “primordial art,” that is, prehistoric cave paintings, which are the most ancient depictions of humanity, paintings that depict animals and death, their and our death. On these deep and ambiguous roots, not only human art but also our identity, our differentiation from the animal, our feeling alive, our awareness of it, have been founded.
What advice would you give to a young person wanting to follow your path?
First of all, I wouldn’t know how to define my path, but perhaps no one can define it; doing so is just another way of pulling oneself out of the swamp by pulling oneself up by the hair, like the Münchhausen baron of Zanzotto. “Caminantes, no hay caminos. Hay que caminar”: these are the words of Antonio Machado that Luigi Nono and Andrej Tarkovsky have already used as titles of their works.
In an era defined by post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still have importance and strength?
“Sacred” is one of those words that my ideological and philosophical tradition has strongly denied. But it is probably precisely what is denied with such force that we consider very important: only a believer can blaspheme.
Sacred to me is what Walter Benjamin, as shown by Giorgio Agamben, called “bare life”: something that comes before the law, perhaps even before linguistic expression, something that is at the border between human and non-human, and is perhaps the entry point into the human condition. A liminal zone, a limbo, something that, when it is named, is no longer there (like “truth” according to Pasolini in *What Are Clouds?*).
I declare myself a materialist and atheist; although I have great admiration, and let’s say even envy, for those who believe. I think it is the same admiration I feel for artists, who are all in some way believers. The condition of those who believe is a limit state that I can only admire.
How do you envision the future? Can you give us three ideas that you think will guide the coming years?
A war has just broken out that is presented as local and instead divides again, as in the twentieth century, two worldviews that are radically incompatible with each other, or, to put it better with the right term, two ideologies: distorted versions of their classical archetypes, liberal democracy and nationalist authoritarianism. We are not yet out of the most severe pestilence of the last century. In fact, we live in the two most significant crises known by recent generations.
In modernity, crises like the two world wars did not produce any catharsis. They left deep wounds, terrifying voids, “lost generations,” but above all they imposed the consideration that nothing has been the same since. In these cases, the only thing we can do is follow Montale’s example: “Just being alive / is no small feat.”
The German artist Wolgang Staehle, wanting to make a remake or perhaps a reenactment of Andy Warhol’s *Empire*, pointed his cameras not at the Empire State Building but at the World Trade Center. And this work, projected on the walls of a New York gallery, had the brilliant idea of doing it in September 2001: thus his work included, without being able to foresee it, the event that twenty years ago changed our world in an unexpected and irreversible way. The only way to foresee the future is to position ourselves in the vantage point of seeing it when it comes true; so staying alive to see it is already much more than many of us can expect from the future.