Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to update the font, size and more. To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.
Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to update the font, size and more. To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.
Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to update the font, size and more. To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.
Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to update the font, size and more. To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.
Futuro Antico. Interview with Giuseppe Garrera
18 apr 2023
Marco Bassan
From museums as places of piracy to his obsession with Pasolini, Giuseppe Garrera talks about his passions and reflects on the future, which he describes as "stupid," just like the past.
What are your inspirational references in art?
An inevitable reference is the British Museum, a magnificent place of piracy—a people of pirates, a phantasmagoria of delinquency, and an illustration of what it means to amass a collection marked by massacre, greed, splendor, theft, and the neurosis of possession and accumulation. I would say I have a deep love for those museums that preserve the marks of injustice, outrage, and the burden of idolatrous dreams and visions. Here in Rome, even more than Villa Borghese (Scipione Borghese's fierce collection is an unattainable model), there is the Museum of Civilizations, with its splendid accumulation of precious works, artifacts, and stolen treasures. Here, even the discipline and virtue of study barely mask the craving and sleepless fascination for enamels, ceramics, gold, trinkets, ivory, woven fabrics, statuettes, idols, and charms.
If I could practice piracy, then my reference would be Venetian painting, and, at the heart of Venetian painting, the work of Titian. The Three Ages of Man in Edinburgh, The Pietà at the Accademia, The Flaying of Marsyas in Kroměříž were, for me, universities of study and each time, undertakings. To make myself understood: I would like to be buried, like a pharaoh, with one of these canvases beside my body to keep vigil over the night—and at the heart of Titian's work, The Assumption of the Virgin at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. Even naming it is a coronation. It is a farewell, the greatest farewell in the history of art. Above all, it is a farewell to Venice (again, a great dream built from spoils and plunder), which recedes toward the horizon like the heavens above, for every traveler leaving it; and it’s also an allegory of every farewell (meaning life itself, a continuous form of impermanence and distance).
What is the project that represents you the most? Can you tell us about its genesis?
The recent exhibition created and curated together with Cesare Pietroiusti and Clara Tosi Pamphili for the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, for the attempt to show “philological reasons” as poetic and guerrilla motives. The exhibition held hundreds upon hundreds of original materials, almost to the breaking point, following one of Pasolini's own formal principles: hatred for the finished form and rejection of style. It was thus a radical philology, against conventional schooling, studies, and publications that attempt to contextualize, box in, and organize—all of which turn out to be corrective systems and containment practices to make authors harmless. As Carmelo Bene teaches, a poet, a writer, an artist, if they are truly so, are always rascals and scoundrels, dangerous (as noted in a contemporary newsreel mocking Pasolini, "The last thing we needed... was Pasolini").
What importance does Genius Loci hold for you in your work?
As a collector and gatherer of idols, places are always sanctuaries and dispersed realms to me (I would say everything is a dispersed realm). Much of my time is spent uncovering traces of cults and passions in houses, libraries, cellars, or at points of discard. For instance, the market at Porta Portese, where items lie scattered on the ground by basement clearers and junk dealers at their most humble state, is full of relics (papers, books, documents) of devotions to be saved. More generally, I see much of the history of painting as a form of ex-voto, giving thanks for lights, dawns, sunsets, trees in the wind, walls, meadows, fields, towns, and skies—a survey of the holiness of places and their names, a topography even present in the halos of saints or the blue mantle of the Virgin.
My places (for example, the industrial outskirts of Turin, which meant more to me than the soul) form a biography like heraldic science, an ornament, a coat of arms, a badge of knighthood. And then, in my particular case, I live in Rome, surrounded by the ruins of all histories, with thousands of statues and paintings to catalog each place. Some corners of Testaccio, where I live, even hold in their scents and essences the unhappy Calabria of my ancestors. Above all, as mentioned, it means wandering among griefs, heirs, dispersed treasures, stories, and genealogies to gather and reclaim.
How important is the past for imagining and building the future? Do you believe the future can have an ancient heart?
The future has one defining feature: it’s always stupid; our focus on the past is, in reality, a somewhat futile attempt to escape that stupidity. But, of course, the past is stupid as well. My brother, who often has a preacher-like manner, reminds me in these cases that truth is everything we’ve forgotten. The “ancient” is this oblivion, while the future—and our work in art, collecting, cataloging, and the archaeological operation of the present—is a struggle, perhaps a desperate one, against amnesia.
What advice would you give to a young person who wants to follow in your footsteps?
To treasure one of the great virtues of youth: not knowing how to live. I would remind them that we go to museums, read, study, and listen to music because we don’t know how to live. And then, to do everything possible to escape the poverty of oneself.
In an era defined by post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still have importance and strength?
Everyone is a saint, Pasolini used to say; all things are epiphanies and farewells. I would never forget that we have the privilege of dying, and as long as we hold this privilege, every act, thing, and gaze of ours is and will be sacred. I just spoke to my father on the phone (he’s 89); we said nothing of substance, but I heard his voice, and, as they say, that is enough.
How do you envision the future? Could you share three ideas that you believe will shape the coming years?
Without a doubt, the first would be: indulgence, the art of eating well, thinking about good food, being gourmets as a mark of civility and zest for life—a civilization dedicated to the pleasures of the table, grateful to the culinary arts. Giacomo Leopardi foresaw this in our current era, and I’d extend his prediction to tomorrow as well: knowing how to enjoy a meal, finding that special little restaurant we know. In the hour of revolution, happily seated with an aperitif, with a generation of gourmets talking about injustices.
The second: the ultimate triumph of the wealthy. There will be no future for the poor, even in terms of respect, esteem, or compassion (honestly, as Flaiano put it, people have long been tired of them).
And the third guiding idea, as predicted by Elsa Morante: life will be constantly used. Life used rather than lived, which is an affront to life itself. I, of course, start off poorly, with parents who worked all their lives in factories, their lives entirely used up. For all of this, there is no forgiveness.