CONCATENATIO
These works, where an interlocking sequence of destructions follow one another and
get tangled as to nearly form an only
new “shape”, arise from the vision of different printings and engravings representing the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755
and more. The XVIII century is remembered as one of the most disastrous in the European History, strike by a long
series of natural catastrophes, plagues and famines which provoked thousands of
deads across the whole continent. Some of the most disastrous earthquakes,
which have ever striken Europe and part of the Mediterranean area, including
Italy, concentrated just in this
century. However they arise, above all, from the illuminist Rousseau’s
reflections, who holds that revolution and catastrophe intertwine, up to Kant
whose interlocking sequence of catastrophes are provoked by the man’s convergent
and persistent actions, to Leopardi,
to Foucaul with his Ontology of present
and Jean Luc Nancy with his Equivalence of disasters - after Fukushima.
A
catastrophe is a breakthrough The change, the sudden breakdown of an order, of a form, not necessarily
brings to its end; instead this changing sometimes is the readjusting of a form
to a new one. A change, an event which brings us to think not only over the reasons and the happening itself , but even
more over the emptiness undermining our certainties, the sense of the present and its current events, the concept of
humanity. The threat of an imminent
apocalypse appears as a deep feature of our civilization whose loss is nearly total and definitive. And a feature, in some respects unedited and disturbing of our
era, is the equivalence between natural
, nuclear catastrophes and the civilization ones, tightened in one single and tangled Sintagma. What happens nowadays? What’s happening now? The word NOW includes all
of us. Having a sense of the present, a direct touch with the world because with
the catastrophic event follows the
strengtening of the word US , the identity of those of us who survived , us
spectators of this show full of pathos we somehow become also interpreters of. Paradoxically a catastophic event , in its different forms and
expressions , seems to strenghten the collective awareness but above all becomes the permanent background within which all of
us get around nowadays. We are living in a period when the accident is overall,
systemic, globalized, a disaster degenerates producing a chain
of disasters , but this globalization cancels space and time distances so that
nowadays we take part in what happens despite us.
