Listen to the audio contribution here:
[...] Here there is another kind of nourishment, we have to understand that all art is nourishment of art. Being in Rome is a terrible thing, here one gets fat -- how to say art functions on a subtle, subtle, subtle nourishment, ... and whoever can keep it flies [...]
[...] I remember something about Mario Merz at the Brera Academy beautiful, then he was drawing on the blackboard in an admirable way and there were many photographers on this occasion. When he stopped drawing, the photographers said to him, "Why don't you stand next to the blackboard that we take your picture? Mario went crazy ... pictures are taken when we don't notice, when we are overthinking [...].
[...] The cups are a bit of an homage to my Florentine training. Beato Angelico always kept on this theme a two-dimensionality. However, there is also an aspect of depth here. The cups are forms that have to do with our emotional part, all the containers, cups, bottles, vases have to do with our emotional part so they arise from these reflections; then they stand between them in a way as we stand between us, in a conversation, an intentional relationship that expresses an infinity, with gold in the center. In this wall I had to compress a little bit but this compression makes sense and you can go through it like an 8 and the center of this path is the gold which is also like the breath. You breathe in, you bring in and send out, so this aspect is the aspect of vitality, and its highest point is therefore the central cup, it is the gold. In the other setups, when we did the exhibition with Mario and Dora in '86 we occupied 3 walls and the gold had its own wall by itself. There were these 4 colors black white and green and incarnate on one wall while yellow blue and red which, according to Goethe, are splendors, were on another wall. So there was another reading, there was less compression and more spatiality. But it is also interesting when the work has flexibility and can be offered in different ways. One thing I felt setting up this morning is this aspect of classicism that is of our Italian and European art and it's great. A wall like this, apart from the conditioners, which is a tribute to the contemporary is like entering a chapel, it's like entering a place of our tradition. A theme that I feel very much is that of seeing oneself to see. I am here and I see myself as I see. This gives us the possibility of being in the moment, out of imagination because normally we don't see things but we see thoughts that we have thought in us and that we have in our experience related to these moments. And so a series of thoughts arise that have nothing to do with the work, they have to do with a mechanicalness, they are mechanical. Every time you see a work you have to make all the connections. In truth this does not allow us to have a real relationship with the work. The interesting thing is when we stand in front of the work without setting these mechanisms in motion, trying to empty ourselves and have an experience and then to see. A Russian mathematician whom I love very much, in the early 1900s wrote a book on the fourth dimension that says I stand in front of this work, there is a direction that goes from me to the work, and then there is a direction that comes from the work to me and then there is the third force that is the strongest element and that is circumstance. The fact that we are here means that we are somehow in the moment ... whereas the mind always leads us to make connections that take us out of the moment, like if you go to visit a friend having thoughts, you don't go to visit a friend you go to bring thoughts to the friend, if on the other hand you go to visit the friend without thoughts, what is born in the meeting with the friend becomes what is to be born. Truth is what is born in the moment that has value, that nourishes us [...]
