Grabriele De Santis, Alek O., Santo Tolone: To go where we have to go, where do we have to go?

To go where we have to go, where do we have to go? is a non-curated mid-life group show by three Italian artists who don’t know whether they count as “young.” After working for over 12 years, we wanted to reconsider what we still refuse to call our careers—starting in a squat, evolving  through MFA programmes and galleries, kicked around by biennials and fairs, courted or shunned by curators, torn by the centripetal force of the market and the centrifugal inertia of peripherality, struggling to resist the pull towards homogenization resulting from the online circulation of images.

To go where we have to go, where do we have to go? embodies the intellectual independence of the first ten years of Nomas Foundation, embracing the legacy of the countercultures of 1968 in their wish to intercept the political in both fiction and reality, and in their focus on collectivitiy. The show will host seminaries, lectures, workshops, screenings, and townhall meetings, streamed online from May 16 to September 7, in collaboration with the Sociological Aesthetics Research Unit of the Sapienza University, Rome.

While writing this presentation we came across a lecture written by Roberto Bolaño shortly before his death, titled “Sevilla kills me.” It includes all we wanted to say, and much more. We made minor adjustments to adapt it to our present situation.

“Where does the [Latin American literature] new Italian art come from?” If I stay on topic, my answer will be about three minutes long. We come from the middle classes, or from a more or less settles proletariat or from families of low-level drug traffickers who’re tired of gunshots and want respectability instead. […] That is, [writers] artists today seek recognition, though not the recognition of their peers but of what are often called “political authorities,” whatever side of the political spectrum it might be (the young [writers] artists don’t care!), and thereby the recognition of [the public] collectors, or [book] sales, which makes [publishers] gallerists happy but makes [writers] artists even happier, because these are [writers] artists who, as children at home, saw how hard it is to work eight hours a day, or nine or ten, which was how long their parents worked, and this was when there was work, because worse than working ten hours a day is not being able to work at all and having to drag oneself around looking for a job in the labyrinth, or worse, in the hideous crossword puzzle of [Latin America] Italy. So young [writers] artists have been burned, as they say, and they devote themselves body and soul to selling. Some rely more on their bodies, others on their souls, but in the end it’s all about selling. So, where does the new [Latin American literature] Italian art come from? The answer is very simple. It comes from fear. It comes from the terrible (and in a certain way fairly understandable) fear of working in an office or selling cheap trash on [the Paseo Ahumada] piazza Navona. It comes from the desire of respectability, which is simply a cover for fear. […] Frankly, at first glance, we’re a pitiful group of [writers] artists in our 30s and 40s, along with the occasional 50-year-old, waiting for Godot, which in this case is the [Nobel] Biennale pavilion, the [Rulfo] DAAD fellowship, the [Cervantes] Prix de Rome, the [Príncipe de Asturias] Turner Prize. […]

It’s a promising scene, especially if viewed from a bridge. The river is wide and mighty and its surface is broken by the heads of at least 25 [writers] artists under 50, under 40, under 30. How many will drown? I’d say all of them. 

The treasure left to us by our parents, of by those we thought were our putative parents, is pitiful. In fact, we’re like children trapped in the mansion of a pedophile. Some of you will say that it’s better to be at the mercy of a pedophile than a killer. You’re right. But our pedophiles are also killers.