Doing it together

 
On a sailboat with other familiar people (but who were they?), I had the feeling of being among people who loved me.
From the “Diario dei sogni”

(Diary of Dreams) by Elsa Morante, 3 March 1938

 
Called on several of my Friends and had the Case of pictures conveyed on board through the Agency of Sig’re Passeri without undergoing the harassing Ceremonies of the Custom House.

From the Memoirs of Thomas Jones, August 1783

 
 
Why become institutionalised?
What induces an artist to leave her own free and autonomous microcosm to intersect with the laws of the macrocosm? Why set up an institution to bureaucratise oneself and forego one’s unregulated independence? And in exchange for what? What’s the point of entering into a load of obligations and duties, paperwork and formalities?
If the intention is not so much that of leaving a burden to an heir, of transmitting one’s work to posterity obligating it to a predetermined vision, but is rather that of considering it a fluid and vigorous substance to manoeuvre whilst alive, then what is it that pushes me to venture into this viscous territory that lies somewhere between the juridical and the fiscal? And if I decide at long last to enter this bureaucratic mechanism, how can I do so without being subjugated?
 
To safeguard my intentions, a machine with a gizmo made up of legal praxis and declarations was designed. In order to persist in my daily action, to be understood and heard, and to try to be incisive, an organisation was set up that recognises and guarantees the artist a legitimate and regularised voice rather than an arbitrary power.
 
The archive was established with a group of people so that I could go out and about and be immersed in the world, calling to arms the people close to me to entrust them with the essence and to draw them all together around the nucleus. I de-subjectified and de-personalised myself to allow counterparts to participate in the project and to accompany them on pushing the intimacy out there, in its totality, in the shared public space. 
 
On the one hand there is the artist who establishes a universe with its own rules and on the other there’s the archive, an organism composed of people she trusts who help her to determine her own world within the world.
The studio that generates the works is under the control of the artist; the archive which historicises them is in the control of the committee. On the one hand there’s the artist who brings out the substance and on the other there’s the committee which nurtures and protects it, which understands and translates it, which monitors and administrates it.
 
First the archive was created as a solitary form of self-determinism and then it turned into a collegial organ. What was generated in solitude is no longer exclusively private but an organism belonging to a group of peers who together support and care for it. Staying together, being part of a group, perceiving oneself only as a portion, extricating oneself from the primary role has become the necessary condition for continuing and supporting the compact and fragile fulcrum of the artistic work.
 
This participatory statute’s crucial role has to somehow be acknowledged, because through it an added value is attributed to the object-work. It is necessary to acknowledge the importance of the intellectual role and the care that the people who make up the archive committee have. On its own, the work is incomplete and is only finalised with the participation of the archive, which from being something the artist manages in solitude becomes something administrated by a group of individuals, of co-authors. If the archive is catalogued as a work within itself, then it could be said that entering this house and supporting this project from the inside means jointly participating in the artistic process.
 
The constitutive act contains a definition of the artist’s poetics. The formal tools that range from the structure of the work’s profile to the certificate of authentic archiving, and from the stamps to the attachments, define a procedure that allows that which until now had remained on the plane of the imagination and of utopia to move onto the plane of authority and concreteness. A sort of interpretation of the world continues to be traced through some aesthetic form of administration.
 
The desire to escape from a solipsistic form so as not to remain isolated and take part in a wider order, pushes me to find the right way to enter the mix and commingle with other systems without feeling subsumed, moulded and homologated. It is precisely this collective system that, elaborating its internal laws and inventing its own procedures, goes on to represent the free complexity that springs from singularity, thus making itself the tool that makes intentions emerge and be respected.
 
The archive, which consists of people who support it through their affection and knowledge, allows the cultural value to be kept separate from the economic one. The autonomy of judgment and action of the former is what gives the system freedom to continue to exist and maintain its artistic gesture. Relating with the legislative body serves to becoming part of a rule of law because it is the emotiveness that overflows from within which prevails, and not the rule of the market.
 
It's okay to become institutionalised but not too much.
In this case it is a question of venturing forth to find a solution that allows two opposing propensions to live side by side. In this case the aim is to institutionalise the indefinable, to yoke that which by its very nature does not want to be bridled. And at the same time, you do everything to break free of any form of encapsulation.
The aim is to define a clear, undisputed and well-structured system but at the same time allowing freedom for each thing to be challenged.
It is important to be able to develop both of the contradictory spirits, the communist one and the anarchic one, and to find the way for them to coexist. On the one hand there is the aspiration to feel part of a multitude, taking part in a shared world, and on the other there is the libertarian vocation that is subtracted from any form of rule. The archive springs from the attempt to give structure to the entropic configuration deriving from human nature and at the same time there is an urge to make it come out of isolation and be immersed in a collective network, not imposing one’s own thought, but remaining in a state that is always willing to dialogue with the external population.
 
In no way was there an idea to create a self-celebratory monument. Nobody is asked to offer an apologetic or commemorative support. The ordered and systematic structure of the collection, which is made up of thousands of fragments, is in itself anti-monumentalist and contemplates the possibility that everything can melt, disintegrate, regroup. Instead, the fellow journeymen are asked to assist in not allowing any particle to escape and to keep the fragmentation open so that it can be rearranged time and again, heading in a new direction. At this point the artist, who is no longer dictated to by self-referential laws, is open to dialogue, and withdraws to make space for her companions, making them feel free to take the substance in hand, letting them compose, broaden and relaunch it, thus further shifting its meaning.
 
(Written in 2023)