Marco Scotini from Milan
Your new daily ritual ...
A sort of theater whose script is written by someone else. The prohibitions are much more than the possibilities of action. A sort of decalogue to which we are forced to abide by. How not to go out, What to wear, what is strictly forbidden to do, how to stay totally uninformed, like being overwhelmed by terror, how to make separation the maximum social value, like distrusting anyone else, like shouting at the infector, to the emigrant, to the person of color… I could stop here. Except that, in this theater, sometimes we try in a Brechtian way to estrange ourselves, to take off the mask. And we also happen to think, to read some memorable pages, to write some passable ones, to look at some beautiful images of a film that we have always wanted to see.
How your way of working has changed?
Not only has the way of working changed but life as such. If the first one wasn't true, we know this is totally counterfeit. If there is a word that I would like to abolish from international language it is the English attribute "smart" as criminal as it seems to me... the smart city is a perfect prison, the smartphone makes us stupidly compulsive and, dello smart working, it's better not to talk. What really got to me about this experience was, de facto, how the health drama was the occasion for a flood of unstoppable rhetoric on the power of artificial intelligence, about the impossibility of braking, to conceive a limit. The machine is perfect and the algorithms do not allow errors…
We are dealing with a new time and space. What are you discovering or rediscovering about yourself?
I'm experiencing things I've been thinking about for a while. Experiencing them negatively makes them urgent, necessary: the interdependence between human and extra-human things, a nature radically rethought within us and not as an outside, the horror of patriarchal culture, the universal right to breathe – as someone wrote just now.
What you're missing? Your personal experience of "absence" and "lack".
My library! Unfortunately I was stuck in my house in Milan, while I keep the library in the house in Cortona. Every library is not a huge pile of books but a space full of ghosts, a wealth of presences that are there and are not there. Infamous lives, mysterious, condensate: cells, microcosms, indivisible units, missed opportunities. Remove books from one shelf and place them on another, it can mean changing the order of history. Adding a simple book to that same shelf perhaps involves distorting its meaning. Collecting some apparently heterogeneous ones means creating a new meaning. Each book takes us back to a time, to a figure, to a space. To a past, to a present, to a future. The paper set stands for a world of possibilities, of anachronisms, it's chaos (allegedly, too human) that we like to live and where you don't run the risk of finding yourself alone.
How do you imagine the world, when everything will start again?
Hard to imagine! The sleep of reason has always generated monsters. And we are experiencing one of the worst pages of the neoliberal chapter, authoritarian, repressive and neufeudale. I don't know if the state of exception will end one day... Indeed: if we don't reverse it it will be permanent.
Mark Scotini is an Italian curator based in Milan. He is the artistic director of FM Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea. From 2004 he is director of the Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies department at NABA (Milan and Rome) and from 2014 is responsible for the exhibition program of the Living Art Park (PAV) of Turin. He curated the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015), three editions of Prague Biennale, Anren Biennale (2017) and the Second Yinchuan Biennial (2018).