Virginia Zanetti from Prato

Your new daily ritual…
I've been in isolation since 26 February, during these days a sense of oppression has alternated due to the absence of freedom, lack for loved ones, pain and anger at how things are handled, gratitude for ordinary people who show us the way by offering their lives to protect that of others, fear that despite these sacrifices everything will return as before, frustration, helplessness and poor concentration, but also more adherence to my life, it seems that thanks to suffering we are able to live our existence more deeply and understand ourselves better. Lo scrittore Saneatsu Mushanokoji (1885-1976) once he said: “Whether the others see me or not, I will continue to flourish ". It is important to live in our own way and understand what our role may be in relation to others. I also use meditation to try to see things as they are and fuel creative rather than destructive thinking. So I try to keep myself busy doing something for others, for example with some young Buddhists with whom we do activities to continue the practice at a distance and for my students. Three days a week I teach from home, we are no longer a group of people in one room, but a group united by electronic devices. Then I try to move the body, because thoughts reverberate from being alone indoors, so I walk at least an hour a day. A few meters from the house is the forest of the Calvana Mountain, I observe nature, encounter wild animals, I find myself talking to the trees, I know new plants, I listen to the wind, I smell the earth, I contemplate nature. This crisis without half measures has shown that the logic of individual accumulation is fragile and that prosperity is only achieved by acting together with confidence. He also gave us something extremely precious: the weather, in which to reflect, study and ask questions about our condition. Covid-19 showed us that prosperity is not "how much", but how", quoting Pepe Mujica, former president of Uruguay, for someone he took away what was superfluous, including small and large selfishness and helps to put aside in a natural way that little self that saw personal needs at the center of the world by shifting attention to what is collective.

How your way of working has changed?
«True art, that is, that which is not satisfied with the variations on the established models, but which strives to express the intimate needs of man and of humanity today, it cannot cease to be revolutionary, that is, it cannot but aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society, and even just to free intellectual creation from the chains that bind it and allow the whole of humanity to rise to the heights that only lonely geniuses had reached in the past ". (1) I initially suspended everything to observe, I dedicated myself to tidying up and cleaning both the house and my works. After the first period of disorientation and bewilderment, finding myself in the void and in the concreteness of days marked by few needs gave me a sense of relief. I try to respond to emails and some proposals, however I cannot keep up with the rhythm because I experience an inner contrast between the annoyance for an excessive presence of culture and the gratitude for it that, with his poetry, it turns out to be the only way to defeat time. All work commitments (so they know everything about the countless biennials, residences, biennial etc.) that I had planned were frozen, like any other activity not considered "necessary". I believe this has had a strong psychological and emotional impact for me, and in general for every artist who makes his work a unique and continuous time in his life. A profound transformation of the sense of artistic practice that has generated a feeling of the sublime, because it made me go through the fear of losing everything. Overcoming this fear has brought art closer to life. In an emergency, the creative act - transforming poison into medicine - moves within life itself and can be put at the service of the community with other forms. To give a concrete example, what I proposed as a practice in the work Call me the 2011 where I guaranteed my presence in the exhibition with my telephone number, through the extension of the self, date from my smartphone, it has become a practice of all people who want to overcome isolation. This elsewhere in communication can facilitate the sharing of personal content usually left out of formal classes or meetings, somehow the current condition of shared quarantine provides the ground for unexpected proximity and the construction of a common feeling that perhaps would not have expressed itself in a normal situation. Furthermore, the emergency clearly showed that the artist category in Italy is one of the weakest or non-existent, finally with artists and insiders we are facing, through working groups, our condition of "permanent emergency". I study and try to understand what the current revolution could be and how I can make my contribution. Many solidarity groups for hospitals are born spontaneously, such as the one curated by Francesca Guerisoli, who asked me to participate in the support initiative I Have a Gift (https://www.facebook.com/IHAVEAGIFT22), offering my work for free: so i thought i'd share one of the quarantine journal jobs, made in watercolor, technique that I love for its ability to induce me to meditate, precisely with the sole purpose of governing the mind with respect to anxiety.

How do you imagine the world, when everything will start again?
A Buddhist text, the Sutra of the observation of the mind as the earth states: “If you want to know the causes of the past, look at the effects of the present; if you want to know the effects of the future, look at the causes of the present ". (2)
It all comes down to how people and rulers deal with this pandemic now.
To imagine the world we need to adopt a basic world thought that satisfies objective e, accordingly, to put all our actions at the service of this thought.
The main goal that moves the world - ordinary people and politicians - could shift from greed to compassion.
If the goal of life on this earth is to protect Life - people, animals, nature and the environment - putting their well-being first, then we can use creativity, intelligence, science, ecology, technology to tackle disease, cataclysms, famines, any wars.
Se, instead, we continue to think that individual happiness and wealth can exist to the detriment of others and we accept the over-exploitation of everything that exists, the world to come will be increasingly affected by disastrous events, the social gap will increase and therefore also wars, pollution, illnesses, famines.
If the whole system moved towards the real interest for the good of people and life, with current technological capabilities, we would have the opportunity to counter and govern these cyclical moments of crisis and destruction that are part of existence.
This emergency has the power to show all people those destructive mechanisms that many were already trying to counter by trying to reverse the trend through individual actions or small resistance groups..
So we can imagine the after, only through the choice of ideas and actions that we choose in the present, where everyone is.
In my small way I am part of several groups, speaking of the field of art, for example with the Estuary group (https://www.facebook.com/estuarioprojectspace) we carry on the education and teaching of contemporary art in the Prato area. I believe that art should be increasingly connected with all other fields of existence, in fact I contributed to the birth of the laboratory of the future from an idea of Fabio Cavallucci (laboratoriodelfuturo.it). The aim is to discuss the developments of the main issues of our time, trying to bring together intellectuals and ordinary people on issues often distorted by the media. Just in these days we had our first virtual meeting because now we are in the "future", we imagined developing new ideas and sharing them with an increasing number of people over the years, using the old system modes, and now the system has already changed and the laboratory of the future has become necessary. If it is true that after a deep crisis we begin to rebuild with the ideas that are around, it is now important to collect them and make them available. The situation is serious, not only because of the pandemic and the pressing economic crisis, but also because it made us speechless. This is the time to imagine a better future, given that the situation of global zeroing can make it possible to create the basis for, when we leave, it can be done by eliminating the defects of the past.
«The function of the Laboratory of the future thus becomes not only that of a useful but abstract research, of a potential prompter for the benefit of the policy, but rather a concrete tool to help rebuild a possibly better tomorrow right away. To this end it is urgent to open a dialogue, although online, with the best intellectuals of our time and share their proposals, make them become the subject of discussion and common growth ". (3)

Notes to the text
1 From Manifesto for an independent revolutionary art, represented by the Gagosian gallery, 25 July 1938, André Breton, Diego Rivera (**)
2 Dal Gosho The opening of the eyes (Collection of Nichiren Daishonin's writings, volume I, once. 252)
3 From the letter of Laboratory of the Future that we are sending to the intellectuals

Virginia Zanetti he has collaborated with Italian and foreign institutions for culture and contemporary art such as the Man of Nuoro, the CCC Strozzina of Florence, the Pecci Museum in Prato, the Mac of Lissone in Italy, the Kunsthalle in Bern and the CACT in Bellinzona in Switzerland, l’IIC in New Delhi and Zurigo. It has won institutional awards such as the Movin Up Award 2015 of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and the International Competition for artists for the creation of permanent works of art for the Palazzo di Giustizia in Florence in 2017, the first Maccaferri Award for photography, Artefiera 2019 and the third edition of Smartup Optima 2019, Naples. His work is present in public and private collections and in publications such as Open sky and Brief history of curating di H.U. Obrist, postmediabooks, Milan. Recent projects: Abyss, by Virginia Zanetti, edited by Francesca Ceccherini, per IIC, HdK Zurich University of the Arts, TONI-AREAL, Zurigo CH; Create Space, PAV Turin; future: The Pillars of the Earth, edited by Matteo Innocenti, Resistance Museum, Bologna, IT; Canto V, Odyssey, by Dimora OZ, per ARKAD, manifest 13, Marseille. His reference gallery is Traffic Gallery, Bergamo.
www.virginia-zanetti.com