Marco Tonelli from Spoleto (PG)

We are dealing with a new time and space. What are you discovering or rediscovering about yourself?
I don't know if we can still speak of a generalized and shared "we", as if it were a more or differently aware system or organism, but certainly Western subjectivity has been affected by this latest shock, which lasted too short to change the structure of space and time. But it gave us the opportunity to experience them and imagine them differently. I believe this possibility, touched by hand, left a mark on us, destined to manifest itself in the future, like cracks in walls or cracks in glass. We have rediscovered, if ever there was a need, our fragility, weakness and fear.

We are realizing that we can live with less mobility?
On a private level, this was the well-being we enjoyed the most: slowing of rhythms, temporary suspension of nomadism, often neurotic and uncontrolled, during our social and / or professional relationships. The quality of a person cannot be given only by his presence, by its economic means that facilitate it in moving, but from what one has to say. In short, not from what we see or what we talk about, but from what it says. Return to the contents of the speech, of the work of art, of writing would be a healthy pandemic to sweep the rhetoric of empty and mercenary thought.

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?
Having even more awareness of the need to think and live differently, not adapting to that pace, almost obliged, in which the hyper-connected contemporaneity, politically correct, transparent, within everyone's reach, requires us to be. While in reality, exploiting these noble concepts, homologating thoughts are brought forward, market, appearance, Fashion, opportunism of the moment. If we want the most immediate consequence that then concerns the long term is simply to understand even more deeply that being contemporary here and now is worth nothing if you are, even before, aware of the past and with a vision towards the future.

Marco Tonelli (Rome, 1971). After Graduation, Specialization and Research Doctorate, his activity was divided between institutional positions (Head of the Quadriennale exhibition office in Rome, Councilor for culture of the Municipality of Mantua and currently Artistic Director of Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto) and teaching at Academies of Fine Arts. He has curated projects related to sculpture at Palazzo Ducale in Mantua or urban art for the Montelupo Fiorentino Museum Foundation, focusing his research on artists such as Pino Pascali, Leoncillo, Francis Bacon (of which he has written monographs and essays) or on contemporaries such as Fabrizio Plessi. Latest projects carried out: the exhibition Paolo Canevari: Dark matter at Palazzo Collicola and the book The sculpture by Alberti Burri: reverse opera (1978-1992) published by the Palazzo Albizzini Burri Collection Foundation.
www.palazzocollicola.it