Cement, lie as a social glue
All started in a place we knew very well. There was the only community centre of the area, a municipal slaughterhouse that, after having slaughtered a big piece of public money, had been dismissed even before just one beef-steak had been produced. The community centre continued to work for about another couple of years, then – a nowadays typical singularity – it’s not been evacuated by the police, it just imploded. Now, it’s been transformed in a bulky waste collection site, around which about dozens of abusive micro-dumping grounds gravitate.
We are at Quarto, Naples. More than fifty thousand inhabitants. Here it’s like the majority of hinterland towns: three-four floors houses lately transformed, thanks to the Berlusconi little laws, in – hear, hear – attic heats, a sort of chalets, in fact some people joke about the town calling it Quarto d’Ampezzo. And then, what’s more: railroad and drugs to escape away, clothing stores, hairdressers, bars, betting shops, and two shopping malls. The first one, Le Campane (The Bells), looks like a little delicatessen, after you have seen the new one, Ipercoop, a true pride for the town.
Now, you have to know that new roads had to be built to arrive to the Ipercoop. All right, fair enough. European funds are for this kind of things. There was already a beltway with the ring road that was used to arrive to Quarto with no need to exit at Pozzuoli-Via Campana (just the ozone knows how much traffic this exit created), but for all the Eighties and the Nineties it’s been closed. That road was finished, we went there to play soccer. The field could be as long as you wanted, and it was beautiful to lay on the deserted road, or look down from its piers. The road was there, good and ready and nobody opened it. Why offer a service, if nobody earn anything? Some years later after the road opening, near there the shopping mall was born. To us it seems that this is Planning. Who says there is no planning in these places? And you plan just if you have a development idea. This idea is based on the modernity main axiom: More Everything equals More Happiness.
This equation would just make us laugh, if we wouldn’t see the tragic consequences of it everyday, and if we wouldn’t see the almost total adhesion of people to this kind of development model. So, painting on the foundation of this delirious symbol, we asked ourselves: what does unite the socialconsumercapitalist society, yet? Especially thinking about the waste disaster that summarized the madness of it all. We are not sure about it, but we thought about the lie. Once upon a time they said that lies were short-legged. But today? Lies are pillars, made of powerful cement castings. Then, all this cement compacts a fragmented humanity about to evaporate. Drop-men, scientifically missing sea that survives pretending. Pretending what? To believe. Believe in the news, in mass-media, in social network self-narrating celebrations, in statistics, in numbers, in God. It’s not that newspapers, television, and internet don’t tell the truth. Let’s say it’s a grated truth, scattered here and there, and it’s difficult to isolate it from other things, so the cynic (or undeceived) ones believe in nothing anymore (it’s all bullshit), and the naïve (or defenceless) ones believe in everything (television told it). The thing that disturbs us is not the lie itself, the lie can be also funny and sometimes useful too, «…tell us who was so we sentence him to death / I don’t know I didn’t see anybody…», but the vague mass where the lies finish to go in. The uncritical adhesion to this general lying that people think to be true. The lie that is not another scale pan, but just a measure that makes insignificant any other view of the world. Coming back to us, we invite you to come and see, or even better, feel the work we realized in the past three years in this place, with the precious help of some of our dearest friends. Also painting is fiction, sure, but as someone wrote: «Only poetry lives only by fiction. It’s a continue lie that has all the characteristics of truth. There are neither deceptions, nor misunderstandings: tackling a text, a work of art, a movie, means accepting to believe in the existence of non-existent realities, accepting to short-circuit the semantic fields of our words, accepting to discuss our prejudices». Our fiction is also an invite to not follow the new interplanetary ideology that inexorably spreads over shouting: «Lies of the world, unite us!» (c&k)
