Troubaduor #8

As part of the ‘Libere tutte’ exhibition at Casa Testori, Giuseppe Frangi invited me to officially present my archive-work for the first time. I decided to take with me Antonella Campisi, the assistant who had followed its first five years, organising the material and structuring the archive, and Roberto Boldi, the programmer who built the IT system.
This was the first conference where I realised that what I was doing had taken on the status of a work. It is the situation that started to help me understand the creative potential of this discourse. I remember people who had explicitly expressed the fact that through my voice the site came alive.

Troubadour
A performative act that takes shape through a conference.
A way of giving shape to the ‘Mindsite’, to the word that runs alongside the process, opening to the public and to a dialogue with others.
Interacting with my tool-site through an oral discourse. Like a troubadour wandering around the world with his pamphlets, I narrate my story each time reactivating the reasoning around the work. The discourse is never planned but is improvised. It changes according to the personal moment, the context and the people who are interacting with me in the conversation.
In some cases, the performance can be reactivated through another person – someone who knows my work and is familiar with my site. In this case, the other becomes the interpreter and pulls the discourse towards them.

«In the last few days, a question has come to me that I am far from able to answer: what if returning to the knowledge of the myth, of the story, were definitively one of the greatest achievements we could aim for? If, at the end of the long course of the logos, it were the value of the word, of the story, of the song and of the poem to lead us back to the meaning? This is why […] I roamed between philosophy and poetry. If even a serious thinker like Severino has to search for his antagonists among the poets and the ‘philologists’, then there has to be something there in the meeting between reasoning and evocation. And so: long live troubadours like you.»
(Elena Volpato, email to Maria Morganti, 5 February 2020)

«The survival of gestures and images, in other words of an immaterial wealth rather than a tangible one made of objects, and its reactivation or re-enactment and interpretation or translation, which in the field of new technologies is related to remediation, are both central questions of the contemporary debate about the archive.»
Cristina Baldacci, in «L'archivio d'artista" (Johan&Levi, 2022)

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