Anna Stuart Tovini and Vincenzo Chiarandà from Milan

What are you missing? Your personal experience of”absence” and of “lack”.
Our home studio is always a meeting place, here UnDo.Net was born and a thousand meetings or celebrations were held for the most varied projects. From late February to today, only rumors have entered; people smoking near the window, laughs a little’ squat, the toasts and the grim looks, no.
We have had to whitewash for centuries, there is still a scribble on the wall that has remained since Francesca Alessandrini stuck a pencil to hold her hair in a ponytail, but we weren't all around the table and were leaning a little’ everywhere. She had been very agitated arguing and in the meantime the pencil had written itself on the wall. Francesca is no longer here too…

New places and alternative spaces of cohesion have arisen around you? (we think of the courtyards of the palaces, to the terraces etc.…)
We live in a special neighborhood: the Milanese Chinatown. Our friends from the restaurants across the street closed first and then handed out (free) hundreds of masks that have been sent. They went to give them to people in line in front of supermarkets. The boys of the Franca Rame Brigade took their places in the toll booth at the corner of Porta Volta and played and sang the 25 April, and then they always kept the cart full with things to leave or take (pasta, jars, biscotti, soap), a solidarity initiative available to anyone in need: both to be generous and to be helped. Feeling useful is good for you!
Ours is a typical Lombard railing house, well maintained but still with the balconies that run in front of the entrance to the apartments, a kind of long shared balcony on each floor, so there is not much privacy even if you want. In the first two levels live very diverse people, those on the third have all fled to the mountains and to the sea. So those who remained made mass, guarding the old men. For example by hanging signs written in felt-tip pen everywhere “Valeria do not go out!”, the children on the second floor started playing with water and telling stories to Augusta who listened to them from the first, books to trade were lined up under the mailbox, there were those who also cooked for others, loans and gifts went from one level to another via the elevator and the poor Bullo howled every time an ambulance was heard passing (in silence night and day, together with the songs of the blackbirds…).

How do you imagine the world, when everything will start again?
To answer this question, we like to quote Mark Fisher: “The production of a new culture requires a use of time towards which communicative capitalism manifests profound hostility. Most of social energy is sucked into the vortex of late capitalist labor and its grandiose simulation of productivity […] If there is a future, it will depend on our ability to recapture those uses of time that neoliberalism has tried to exclude and make us forget”. M. Fisher, Our desire is nameless. Political writings, Minimum Fax, 2020

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?
All winter we held meetings to organize Walk-In Studio, the festival of exhibitions in artists' studios and spaces. This project was born to create a circuit of exchange and meeting, to favor”social approach”! It was supposed to be in June and, instead, it slipped into October.
Our book came out at the end of January Profiles – Portraits of things and people from an island in the middle of the Atlantic (published by Meltemi). It is part of a larger project started in 2018, we were organizing the presentations when everything faltered and still today it is not clear when and if we will be able to concretize the hypotheses that had been made.
Then we also had to cancel several studio visits… And many things will never happen again; the consequences will be, as always, fruit of chance.
However, during the quarantine we made many new jobs for which the situation was a strong stimulus or a starting point..
Then, it was interesting to participate in some of the digital projects that developed during the lockdown and I think the reaction of artists and culture workers too (both through the commitment of Contemporary art forum that of AWI movement) prospect new opportunities for Italian artists, even if in the short term it will be very hard. The ferocity and abuse have not entered the "suspended time" so cited by journalists, there are artists who died in prison on hunger strike without being heard, there are those who hit the girl as beautiful as a manga with the butt of their rifle, who demolished the theater symbol of culture against the Albanian mafia, pneumonia in Africa, the promiscuity of the poor in India and those who died in Milan, in the midst of his bags, because even the dormitory was infected…
The liberal vision of recovery will certainly not be more attentive to ecological problems or to the rights of public schools. At first we thought that this disaster could be an opportunity to learn something, now that it could instead become the excuse to do even worse. But he certainly made everyone understand that “it is not always others who die”.

Award-winning company (Anna Stuart Tovini and Vincenzo Chiayield). Active since 1984, based in Milan, Premiata Ditta questioned the issues of authorship and the economy by developing participatory and interactive artistic projects. In 1995 created the UnDo.Net network which is still accessible today as an online archive. From 2015 the action of Stuart Tovini and Chiarandà develops through the production of new works, installations and lectures, furthermore, in recent years Premiata Ditta has organized Studi Festival (and currently Walk-In Studio), a public art initiative that involves and coordinates dozens of authors. Premiata Ditta has been included in important Italian awards and reviews as well as numerous publications and international exhibitions.
I am among the participants of the Forum of Contemporary Art and among the founders of Walk-in Studio, artist studies festival held in Milan.
Their latest project, Profiles, took place in collaboration with the inhabitants of the island of Graciosa (Azores) the Rocca di Umbertide Center for Contemporary Art in Umbertide and the Rocca Roveresca in Senigallia 2018 and 2020, the book of the same name published by the publisher is part of it Meltemi.