Bebbe Calgaro from Vicenza
How your way of working has changed?
I think many artists can understand me when I say that creativity lives in a cyclical and non-progressive time like, instead, is the work on commission. So basically the typology of my work hasn't changed much. I have given myself some small rules to eliminate the boredom that this suspended time can cause. No television, only movies on cd. No remote controls, no obsessive zapping. One night a week I watch an arthouse film. Last Friday I looked at the “Desert of the Tartars” directed by Zurlini. I have no problem using social media when I can: in the morning I prefer facebook, instagram happens to me at the end of the day. Then after dinner just music and maybe a book.
With which objects and spaces of your daily life are you interacting the most?
After a week of quarantine, I saw a transformation in my studio: the various areas of my open space were delimited by chairs. Perhaps because I instinctively sought greater hygiene and did not want to contaminate the whole space. So I almost automatically divided the entrance area, the living area and finally the sleeping area with chairs. Previously these were only design objects with a seating function: now they stand there in line, almost unrecognizable submerged by pants, from shirts, from the suits. Small open-air closets, a wall of clothes between me and the virus. The white backdrop was already stretched out, the light is the natural one that I am lucky enough to have here. I tried to crystallize and photograph the clothes as I had casually placed them. This is how the small "private suit" project was born.
Museums and galleries have reacted to the moment with digitalization and virtuality. What are your "strategies" for establishing new relationships?
I followed some direct, but in all honesty I must tell you that I was a bit bored. I don't think I'm the only one seen the few dozen people who were connected. I think it depends on the limit of the format. It is not enough to turn on the video on your mobile; after a while the same story that you listen to carefully on the radio, on instagram it gets boring. I think virtuality must be rethought from the start and built on greater interaction with listeners who never have to become spectators. Communicating only in a virtual way is a bit flat. Big problem for me was also the bad audio and video signal, it was often the common denominator of the interviews of this period and that tells us how far Italy still has to go on broadband. But it is clear that television has been replaced by the web even in moments of precarious connections. Empty TV studios, journalists connected in smartworking who interviewed experts via skype.
How do you imagine the world, when everything will start again?
I think we can start again only when we understand where we went wrong and how much harm we have done to the planet. Only in this way can mankind be reborn, leaving again is not enough. I have never believed in economic globalization or in global art. The world that awaits us will be different for quite some time. We will leave when we are happy to see that the small grocery store at the end of the street is still open and when we stop for a coffee as if it were a small daily gift.
To date, what have been the immediate consequences of the spread of Covid-19 on your work for you and what do you think the long-term consequences may be?
This epidemic has not only frozen but has depleted our system built like a reactor that cannot be stopped without collapsing. The consequences will be very serious, especially in a country where for years it has been theorized that culture does not eat. We will have to learn how to change the skin in a cleaner world.
Calgaro brothers is the pseudonym with which Beppe Calgaro, graduated in philosophy from the University of Venice with a thesis on aesthetics by Walter Benjamin, he has signed his artistic work since 2003. At the center of the videos of the photographic images of the Calgaro brothers, there is research that, starting from the reality of the places or people portrayed, pushes photography towards visual oxymorons. Fratelli Calgaro pursues and signs projects by releasing them from the client and trying to represent the aesthetic contradiction of reality.
Their works are andmoved to Italian galleries and museums. As an advertising photographer Beppe Calgaro photographs for national and international lifestyle magazines and fashion brands.
http://www.beppecalgaro.com/