The body and the shelter: contemporary art and responsibility. A conversation with the D’Innocenzo Brothers

from Ossigeno 14

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So: if responsibility means the power to act facing the consequent impact, let me begin not with an abstract, but with a fact.

On 16 November 2023, in a world more and more burning, the committee responsible for appointing the curators of documenta 2027 – one of the world’s most awaited contemporary art events, born in the aftermath of World War II with a very specific purpose: to remind us that art and culture are humankind’s most powerful line of defence – resigned en bloc, echoing the quitting of two other members: poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote, following the publication of an article accusing him of antisemitism and support for the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement in defence of Palestine’s right to exist, and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Israeli artist, philosopher and psychoanalyst. The committee’s resignation letter concluded with these words: «In this intellectual climate of over-simplification of complex realities and its resulting restrictive limitations, we do not believe that there is space in Germany for an open exchange of ideas and the development of complex and nuanced approaches, that artists and curators deserve».

Actually, the committee’s resignation – their act of taking responsibility – could have been (and intended to be) translated into a single plea: wake up.

Wake up, the vital responsibility that contemporary art must assume in front of a world more and more burning, and less and less able to deal with the real trait of the contemporary: the complexity. Without having to mention my personal Platonic crush, Professor Giorgio Parisi who won the 2021 Nobel Prize for his systematisation of complex systems, even I renowned loser in Physics have come to understand that complexity requires the coexistence of multiple voices, and that simplification is tantamount to silencing or under-representing some of them. In a complex system as the one crowded with us humans, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which, in Article 29, enshrines Responsibility as a set of individual duties towards the community never going beyond the abstractness of the definition – is echoed by a Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities. Published in 1997 by the InterAction Council, a committee of thirty former world leaders convening regularly, the decalogue sought to fill that gap with 18 articles corresponding to as many responsibilities incumbent upon every human being – from respecting life and the environment to ensuring media freedom, from the duty to develop one’s own abilities to fostering solidarity and justice.

Yet then, despite the noble intentions on the letterhead, what actually happens is that documenta’s committee resigns in despair, a Biennale pavilion remains indefinitely shuttered without even bothering to know what it might have exhibited, on a neo catechumenal Sanremo’s stage an Israeli singer and an Israeli singer (?) stand hand in hand intoning Imagine, heaven forbid we should ever repeat the scandal caused by Ghali the previous year, responsible for daring to utter two sacrosanct words: stop genocide. I still remember his reply, when accused of using the stage for a statement: «But what else should I use it for? I’m a musician». As if to say: in a world more and more burning, and more and more prone to ultra-unilateralism, while bloodied lands have become breeding grounds for the burrs of neo-conquistadores, who else – and who better – to take on the responsibility of visionary, courageous gestures, if not the artist? Let me repeat: visionary and courageous – the sidereal opposite of doctrinaire and rhetorical – because there are no artists less engaged than those who parade themselves as such; and because, if they squander their time decorating topicality or politics, that is anything but art. Self-professed artists posing as humanity’s saviours, an ideal commodified into content, a bubble as a showcase, artwashing or propaganda as the praxis: please, you who call yourselves artists, enough. And please, you who call yourselves the art system, wake up. If the defining trait of the contemporary is indeed complexity, then come back and scandalise us with your own responsibility of disturbing but therefore vivifying visions. Force us to confront with our own responsibility of being able to elaborate critical, complex thoughts, as critical and complex as our times are. Challenge us, shake us up, wake us up. And wake yourselves up.

«Dad, good life screwed you. You used to be a foreman, but now you’ve got the money, and you’re scandalised», said the actor Christian De Sica in 1983 busted by his parents in bed with his male ski instructor in that Italian cultural phenomenon titled Vacanze di Natale (let me take full responsibility for this quote, which would make the contemporary art milieu tear up in despair its mothballed-but-so-chic clothes, as previously for the Sanremo Festival; and the fact that even this movie got screwed by good life, degenerating into the cinepanettone format and privileging the box office over the screen, serves as an apt illustration of how culture has become the sacrificial lamb on the comfortable and sterile altar of today’s irresponsibility and historical paucity).

Accomplice to good life, an atavistic fear of risk – and of the mirror – came. For when we talk about responsibility, we must always look into the mirror, to mirror and to be mirrored. Because a world more and more burning is mirror of what we have done. And because the artist, as Orwell wrote in Inside the whale, «is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, is fiddling with his face towards the flames». The artist is not afraid to be a mirror and to be mirrored in the fire. The artist enters it, aware that the only way out is through.

What happens then is that – if confronted with an irresponsible museum art that has made itself so comfortable, on those censed walls, that it has defused itself, satisfied with its self-congratulatory caption and its pompous press release, with the mansplaining attitude of those who pretend to come and explain something while prudently keeping their distance – other contemporary art territories seem to me infinitely more receptive, more courageous, less egotistical, more aware that, in order to wake you up, you have to be disturbed. Just as Dostoyevsky’s The demons, Pasolini’s Salò, Fassbinder’s Fox and his friends are unbearable, the first time I read Walter Siti and Nicola Lagioia I felt unsettled. Experiencing a Romeo Castellucci theatre work is like crashing head-on; you know you’re going in risking something, thank goodness. Childish Gambino’s This Is America, both track and video, destabilise. And Caligari and Garrone and Cronenberg and Lanthimos (especially the pre-Hollywood-budget Lanthimos, as was the case with Almodóvar – for the function of roots is to keep you grounded…). What I am trying to say is that, while the overwhelming majority of visual art today remains hung on walls, looking down from above on a more and more burning world, much more of contemporary music, literature, and cinema are willing to walk through the fire, to get dirty, to get frayed in the complexity of the zeitgeist, to face the abyss head-on, to responsibly tell the story of the other than itself – with the welcoming sense of those who understand it, the hope of those who still believe in it, the care of those who respect it in every single detail.

And so, when I was told that the theme of this issue of Ossigeno would have been responsibility, the willingness to bring Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo onto these pages was instant. For they know how to fleshly self-tell and story-tell, always assuming the responsibility for their vision. For they are authors of some of the best writing – from poetry (My mother is a weapon, transl.) to screenwriting (not just for their own feature films, but also, for instance, for Dogman by Matteo Garrone; and I won’t be going here into all the awards they’ve won, because for that there’s Wikipedia & co., and because from these pages I always prefer to focus on the thought that substantiates the palmares of every extraordinary artist I met) – but also of the best photography (Night Pharmacy, transl.), and of the best cinema of our consumed times, taking care of it without any discounted leniency, rejecting the cheap sell-out in deferential favour of the mainstream consensus. But there’s another reason why I felt the D’Innocenzo Brothers, born 37 years ago on the same day as the storming of the Bastille – in a way, called to revolution since birth – were perfect for a conversation about the responsibilities of contemporary art: because one of them is the ability to comprehend the other. And they are twins who love each other profoundly, and I believe that no one could be able, better than twins, to know what it means to bear the cross and the delight of welcoming the other out of oneself, of protecting him, of respecting him even more than one is willing to protect and respect oneself: «Having a twin makes you more attuned to listen to the pain of another. I have an image in my mind – the summer sea and us two as children, Damiano overwhelmed by a wave, and me, suddenly alone. I must have turned around twenty times looking for him, imagining life without him. When he resurfaced, he was laughing, and I could barely breathe», Fabio told Angelo Carotenuto during a 2020 interview. And I realise that, for the sake of uniqueness, each of their works is not signed Damiano and Fabio, but D’Innocenzo Brothers. An unlimited liability company, as they are shouldering the heavy, but redemptive, responsibility for contemporary art.

responsibility of context: the hunger

– Did you like it?
– Touching.
– Then why aren’t you crying?
– I don’t feel like crying…
– ‘cause you’re no good at engaging.

– from Boys cry, directed by the D’Innocenzo Brothers, 2018

The D’Innocenzo Brothers immerse themselves and us in contexts they do know well, the first responsibility towards art and the very essence of being in the world, for interpretation without knowledge is presumption. Born in Rome, in the Tor Bella Monaca district, they grew up following their fisherman father’s moves along the Lazio coast. They graduated from the catering college as a safety net, hungry from a very young age for culture and countercultures, which they fed on as autodidacts. There is nothing, in their suburbia portrayal, of all that porno-aestheticizing rubbish flirting between paternalistic romanticisation and gratuitous discomfort, far easier for generalists and armchair critics to judge and digest despite its complexity.

It is life growing at the margins – within abandoned and teeming dormitory-blocks, or in terraced-blocks with inflatable tubs and similar plasticised pseudo-status-symbols – that takes centre stage in their work. Life pulsates raw, and uncomfortable, and no good at engaging, unwilling to take full responsibility for its actions, for it is too hungry. But there it shines, at the margins, ungraceful and disgraced and full of grace, in Mirko and Manolo devouring their chicory pizza and then chomping on chicory-flavoured chewing gums (Boys cry, 2018); in Viola, wearing a synthetic wig because she got lice, staring at her raided birthday cake (Bad tales, 2020); in Ambra, fluorescent in her jacket and eyes, gorging herself on chocolate bombs while asking her father what he wants to be when he grows up (Dostoevskij, 2024). Human beings in a perpetual all-you-can-eat mode, cats hissing when a hand gets too close, electric bodies in acetate tracksuits, tightrope walkers stretched on life’s passacaglia rope (please, also listen to the soundtracks carefully selected by the Brothers, with Città Notte by Egisto Macchi being one of the most significant, contexts enhancing the context) who, totally unaware, carry the full load of their disturbing splendour

It is a majestically curated neo-neorealism, made up of a phrasing of frames that range from asphyxial, like the eyes of surveillance cameras, to artistical, like Hopper’s nocturnes of incommunicability. It is a majestically sharp neo-neorealism, populated by low-cost dreams and micro-ambitions of unworthy clichés, given a horizon that goes no further than a black screen that both feeds and starves, a pre-packaged enough [the original Boys cry title is Land of Enough, Editor’s Note] skin-embedded in flesh brains stomachs of their starving demigods. Yet, I believe that hunger is essential, as fear is, as long as one is strong enough to change its sign, far beyond certain top-down requalification projects (a dangerous word, it smacks of recolonisation). Art itself is born of hunger and fear: at Lascaux the human being, not knowing how else to exorcise them, scratched his hunger and fears onto the walls

I then ask the Brothers about the responsibility of the context, the burden of geography, on the person, and the worth they give to personal responsibility stands out immediately: “We are convinced that it is the people who define a place, not the other way round, as is commonly thought. If there is a correlation between a place and its inhabitants, the infection is spread by them. There is no direct causal link, where direct means clear and therefore comforting. We are always displaced by how terrible things can happen in unsuspected places. But we are equally struck by how similar tragedies happen in easily predictable, almost predestined contexts. So where is the difference? Only in the gaze. If one looks at a suburb with the gaze of a saint posing the feet on a compromised ground, praying for those who live there, one will be predisposed to an open-and-shut, dogmatic, sucker rhetoric. Romanticising a place has the same effect as condemning it: both are based on ignorance of what you are really looking at. We did not look, but by standing inside, we covered our gaze, and there, in those moments, we absorbed so much».

If the image is the scandal of seeing, what the gaze constantly stumbles over, and if our relation to images is now the pathological one of bulimia, then the gaze must be held responsible. «The process of digestion conditions everything, obviously. We’ve seen the ugly in the beauty, the beauty in the ugly, the beauty in the beauty, and the ugly in the ugly. Then we realised that defining things is idiotic. So we don’t think it’s bad luck to be born in a complicated suburb. It’s just a fact. And overturning facts is a task we’ve chosen for ourselves. Both in what we do and in the origin of why we do it – and in theory, we shouldn’t be appointed to this role».

responsibility of formation: the error

«When we are told, “You’re all self-taught”: that’s the only way. When school becomes the first step towards conformity, everything becomes very, very, very dangerous».

– Manuel Agnelli, Leoni per Agnelli: musica per gli occhi. Damiano e Fabio D’Innocenzo, Radio 24, 2024

 

To overturn facts, to know how to see beyond a posture of resignation that sounds like comfort and instead to take on the responsibility of a role one shouldn’t be appointed to, as Raffaele Alberto Ventura states in his editorial for this issue of Ossigeno, and as the Brothers say: this is what the artist does in an almost ignored way – yet history teaches that when politics has listened to art, it has regenerated life – through a responsible gaze and a fertile and hungry imagery, to be nurtured like fruitful soil. When I ask Damiano and Fabio what images have shaped their own imagery, I am stunned by their answer: «We do have many references, fiercely contradictory ones: Pedro Costa, Romano Scarpa, William Gaddis and Vollmann, Charles D’Ambrosio, John Barth’s The floating opera, Upton Sinclair, Federigo Tozzi, Paolo Volponi, Antonio Moresco, Ivano Ferrari, Milo De Angelis, Bruno Enna, Tommaso Landolfi, Giuseppe Berto, Piero Chiara, Don Rosa, Giorgio Manganelli, Richard Ford’s Sportswriter, Schulz, Gombrowicz, Papini, Morselli, Ageev, Bilenchi, D’Arrigo, Delany, Pizzuto, Sciarrone».

The Brothers claim the references of their imagery as a contradictory pantheon – from the most fervent creed to the most agnostic curse, from childish pastels to mature noir – but that is not the point, for among others it was Pasolini in Pigsty who established the vital need for contradiction. What impresses me is that, out of a secular rosary of 29 beads, only one is a director, five are cartoonists, while 23 are writers and poets. Twenty-three out of twenty-nine, roughly eighty per cent. Their imagery is made of words. The Brothers are telling me that for an artist imagination, beyond prefabricated images, means constant formation and constant struggle, which Fabio and Damiano form by transforming words into their powerful images.

In truth, their work can be read as a declaration of love for writing through their own writing, visionary and flawed and tender and complex and sublime, made up of a wild, uncoordinated, uncompromised lexicon. As in the diary penned in green ink by a little girl in Bad tales, that sparks a raw and tragic rêverie in the Greek dramaturgical sense. As in My mother is a weapon, which preserves the same childlike stupor in claiming that writing means existing. As in the syncopated, fraternal dialogue that counterpoints the photographic tableaux in Night Pharmacy. Thus, in Dostoevskij, an unsustainable confession is sustained by an epistolary relationship as a mutual Stockholm syndrome, skilfully dosed words that tear at you in their feral heralds.

What the Brothers write and shape is a microcosm populated by striking role overturnings – overturning facts is a task we’ve chosen for ourselves, they confessed a few lines ago – starting with the implosion of a Norman-Rockwell-painting family in front of the actual complexity, where the only ones who seem to have a sharp vision and a strong sense of responsibility are the children, taciturn good-mannered reflective beautiful and burdened with responsibilities that are not their own. But which they assume. In this microcosm the children are not merely watching us, as for the neorealist movie title, but they write and tell, bearing the responsibility both of the gaze and of the words – which, as all too often is forgotten, are stones. Thus, returning to our slabbed macrocosm, the fundamental moment of formation – of both a child and an artist – stands in opposition to a homologising scholastic and academic (de)formation that machetes art lessons, which is the cause of a kind of transgenic mutation transforming the art atelier into an onanistic clubhouse. A standardised procedure coming from a ministry of education and merit, whatever, which suspends teachers such as Christian Raimo, guilty of telling the importance of being partisan. Consequently, when given the chance to choose, Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo chose to go it alone, to assume responsibility for the formation of their own imagery, with results that made the world open its mouth wide. But, as if to prove how fundamental formation is, when they were not yet able to choose, they came across the exception that proves the rule – because, yes, there are also shining examples that, from time to time, allow us to breathe again, to make peace with humankind.

So it is that, in the grunge years, in a school complex on the fringes of Rome, the teacher Antonio Bernardini reads with pride and satisfaction to his first-grade class the canonical composition What is your father’s job? in which the pupil D’Innocenzo Damiano, to explain that their father was then running a boatyard, writes: My father closes the sea. Reading it superficially, one might dismiss it as an error; but delving deeper – the first great lesson of that saintly teacher Antonio Bernardini – it is one of the most touching things I have ever read. So it is that, in the grunge years, in a school complex on the fringes of Rome, the teacher Antonio Bernardini throws to hell the formality of meagre merit criteria and teaches his pupils that an error is such only if you confine yourself to a superficial reading, without taking the responsibility of going deeper, thereby forming 87 the undoubtedly receptive pupils D’Innocenzo Damiano and D’Innocenzo Fabio to the disruptive power of imagination and the profound power of words – and it makes me smile to know that, for many years, Damiano’s password for everything, by his own admission, was antoniobernardini.

If error is a formative moment often more enlightening than the canon, if a child can write My father closes the sea and learn that therein lies a sense far more vital than the one propagandised by the one-dimensional, insipid, and insidious formalism – and, worse still, by productivity as the only imperative – the lesson to be learnt is that one should always assume personal responsibility for one’s own lateral formation, for no ministerial programme plans to teach you the importance of error as regeneration and imagination as best practice. Thus, I would like to know from Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo what their first lesson would be, if they were entrusted with the responsibility of forming young lives in art – and hence a constructively critical stance in the world. «It is important that you used the term formation and not education, for obvious reasons», they begin to tell me, once again demonstrating the important weight of words. «The question you pose is a complicated one, and the first answer is the fact that we have always evaded the opportunity to teach. Cinematic technique is intuitive. Children are born with a phone in their hand; they shoot videos, edit them, add music to them. It is clear that sometimes the aim and content of this works are ephemeral, but among thousands there will always be someone who aspires to say more, to explore more. To dive into errors, to vivisect them. Both writing and the formation of an aesthetic taste proceed by trial and error. It is vital that the hunger remains high, to cope with all those times when the outcome does not match our ambition. Only those who persist against all odds can escape the mediocrity of never really failing. And that, above all, is the essential condition for an artist. The artist must always face the abyss, and strive for solutions so as not to fall into it».

I know how luminous their reasoning is. I know what it means to learn art independently simply because it makes you feel alive. And I know too how insidious the present can be, for my own formation was that of an obsessive grade-grubbing student, and as the mother of a young woman at university, I constantly struggle with myself not to fall back into that trap. I also see that, for one lecturer who cannot help but demand her the exact dimensions of the German scene in medieval theatre, there is another who, in asking the connection between music and technology, halted her and said yes well alright but I’d like to know what do you think. «It is a difficult moment for the new generations. A lot of things aren’t even experimented in fear of appearing embarrassing, whereas youth is the time in which we should live in embarrassment. It is the moment when all the embarrassment in the world belongs to us. Yet there is a tremendous fear of being cringe. Everything is cringe, but what still hasn’t been realised is that cringe is a foolish definition, used in even more idiotic contexts, proliferating in environments where trial is not contemplated. Or rather, not freely contemplated. To cast off all embarrassment and respect one’s own grace: that is the only advice we feel compelled to give – besides the simpler advice to cease procrastinating indefinitely. If you can make an error, do it now».

responsibility of art: the discomfort

«Recently I have come to understand that films having such widespread, popular consensus are films that speak to no one, they seem not to belong to anyone at all, which is why everyone goes to see them: for they will not return home and reflect upon them. And to me that is deeply destabilising, for art, be it high or low, must be uncomfortable, it must give you a bit of an itch, or else you might as well go have a massage».

– Mattia Carzaniga, Profondo D’Innocenzo, Rolling Stone, 2024

There is little more to say: the greatest responsibility of artists is to remain true to their vital value of being problematizers. In the presence of their works, or their thoughts, they must be able to challenge you, to force you to reflect on a chewed-up status quo, to take a stance that is honestly your own. That is what the Brothers do, claiming diversity as authenticity, without ever commodifying it into an Instagrammable brand or an artwashing tool – «Happy are those who are different / being different. / But woe to those who are different / being common», Sandro Penna wrote in 1938, prophetic of the current self-sabotage we do perpetrate with a sadistic, dysthanasia-like constancy, at the two-faced cry of Broadcast Yourself.

Diversity magnified in their work like a kaleidoscope, both in terms of medium – direction, screenplay, photography, poetry, adverts, videoclips, or even the comic strip of the battered piglet Gino Pilotino, drawn at the age of six through which, as they say, they discovered the existence of the teeth of their father, who used to proudly crack up with laughter – and in terms of aesthetics. From the very mastery of framing since their debut work, Boys cry is composed of nervous tracking shots lit by the cold glare of neon. Bad tales is a hyper-contemporary fresco of sepia-toned memories featuring dysmorphic bodies, bellies and hair and Nazi-like cuts, against the divine grace of children. Latin America (2021) is a labyrinth of perfectly symmetrical tableaux to superimpose the order of a beauty canon upon the chaos of a deranged mind. The videoclip for Ghali’s track Niente panico (2024) is a close-up that explodes in your face, to teach you how to hold the gaze of the other, and Epilogue for Gucci (2020) brings the vivid saturation of surrealist elements into the composition of the most visionary contemporary photography. Dostoevskij, with his textured, raw, scratched 16 mm grain, seems like an expressionist piece translated into seriality (of the crime, as well as of the format), a gastroscopic journey examining unspeakable cavities through the grainy long take of a microtube camera.

And then it happens that, while I am passionately listing the aforementioned successes, also from the critics’ point of view, Fabio and Damiano correct me to assume yet another responsibility, that of dissent: «First of all – and for the sake of our integrity to act regardless of consensus – we must add to your generous list the videoclip we shot in Los Angeles for Kanye West [TALKING / ONCE AGAIN, 2024, Editor’s Note]. There was everything to lose, and that was the crux of the matter, the reason why we immediately said: let’s do it. Even Kanye West has contributed to our imagery. Some of his albums are extraordinary. The bulimia of his ambition is praiseworthy, apart from our distance from some of his viewpoints emerged in recent years». A video through which they knew they could have provoked dissent even before they stepped behind the camera as an opportunity to denounce that, long before the artist, it is the art itself that must speak.

The examples of controversial individuals who have produced artworks capable of moving the bar of thought forward, from Caravaggio to Carmelo Bene, are countless, and we are increasingly forgetting that our surname is not Torquemada and that, in general, contemporary art and moralism are a zero-sum game. It is not about the rectitude of the person, but only about his or her art – which, in order to be such, must always have ethics; but all the more so in a world more and more burning, that ethics can only pass through a sanctified discomfort.

And that is what Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo’s oeuvre is: cerebral concussion. It hits the brain and then everything else, chest cavity included, but what’s most needed is the brain. Its basso continuo is a distortion to shake off narcolepsy, tearing through with the fierce tenderness of someone who knows and loves humanity on the fringes, therefore does not romanticise it. An act of resistance against the contemporary plagues of yeah, whatever (= the self-proclaimed artist posing as a victim of a world that doesn’t understand, do me a favour and go ask yourself a question) + beauty will save the world (= art as an economic-nostalgic legacy paralysed by totally irresponsible canons) + what Bret Easton Ellis called likeability: the urbi et orbi et social media approval prone posture of doing writing or saying something by self-censoring through the filter of others’ placet, a weapon of mass distraction, poser-art, content-art, a comfort zone as treacherous as Glazer’s uncanny Zone of Interest. What’s needed is a cerebral concussion, a counterpoint to the widespread sloppiness for which academicism is the password granting access to the hoity-toity artsiders’ club, aiming to match a painting to a sofa. What’s needed is a cerebral concussion, the very same that ignited Fabio Mauri’s Intellettuale in 1975, when he turned his lifelong friend Pier Paolo Pasolini into a human screen on which to project his own disturbing The Gospel According to St. Matthew outside Bologna’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna, allowing him to publicly assume his artistic and civic responsibility and claim the unsettling yet vital social weight of the most uncomfortable culture. What’s needed is a cerebral concussion, the kind the D’Innocenzo Brothers provoke through unbearable stories and a relentless, absolute commitment both to bravura and responsibility.

«We do have a problem with vagueness. Life is tied to chance, yet when you’re filming, you have to be responsible, to know where you’re headed».

– Stefania Ulivi, Fratelli D’Innocenzo, i gemelli romani che non si accontentano, Corriere della Sera, 2018

That same responsibility Antonin Artaud took upon himself by setting up his theatre of cruelty: «The spectator who comes to our theatre knows that he is to undergo a real operation in which not only his mind, but senses and his flesh are at stake — knowing, of course, that he will not die, but that he will not come out of it unscathed». It is a mechanism as ancient as humankind itself: asking those who choose to undergo it to submit to the promise of an epiphany that both attracts and frightens, yet undoubtedly shakes, and hopefully awakes. It’s the same ancient mechanism of the spellbinding rapture of fairy tales: far from the sugar-coated, woke-ified complacency of a Disney industry turned sclerotic, it is enough to think that we grew up mesmerised by the tales of two other brothers, the Grimms, full of stepsisters who mutilated pieces of their feet to fit into a slipper, hunters who tear apart wolves to pull out entire family trees, cannibal witches fattening up lost siblings… yet the spur was never lacking. Contemporary art must have the same spellbinding rapture of fairy tales. Or rather, of bad tales.

So here’s the bottom line: art is a matter of responsibility. Or perhaps not: a work cannot be boxed into a caption, a manifesto, or a sermon. Then again, yes: in an era where everything aspires to be consolatory beyond the limits of the an/aesthetics, art must assume the responsibility of waking us up. But there’s always that insidious risk of propaganda… So I put it to them: is art a matter of responsibility? And if so, how to reconcile the freedom it owes with the responsibility it requires? «It takes a lot more responsibility not to make art. If the main responsibility of a human being is to stay alive and “sane”, we wonder how one can live a life without trying to fix this game that’s so broken that it’s become unrecognisable. We feel incredibly lucky to make our living from art, but you have to want to, and it’s not easy. It’s not easy because you cannot live in art every second of your existence. You have to do all the things that have to be done and be sad, no, discouraged, no, defeated while doing them. Then, when the creative machine must be set in motion, the only responsibility is to yourself. No one can accuse an artist of cheating, yet one can cheat with remarkable ease. It’s crucial to reflect for a moment on the idea that an artist must necessarily have a civic or political spirit driving the whole thing: do we really care about that? Is it truly as important as we think it is? For instance, when it comes to cinema, is it really necessary to make political cinema, or is it enough to recognise that cinema, by the very fact that it is watched, discussed, rejected, or embraced, generates politics, regardless of the author’s intentions? To deny the political spirit of a fictional work – better if it is well conceived, even better if it is well realised – is paradoxical, because it would mean that we, the spectators, either don’t exist or don’t matter. From another viewpoint: we’re not on the politics payroll, yet our actions, our thoughts, and our reflections are political. Therefore, the only responsibility we feel is to give the very best of our potential: what we’ve learned, what we’ve always known and what we will never know. The rest is up to the spectators, with one fundamental postscript that cannot be subverted: cinema must be experienced by spectators, not by expectators. Those who merely expect, those who only wait, will receive from us nothing but meagre, bland meals. The passive reception of images and sounds is what happens in the dictatorship of normality. And we should fight with all our might for the cinema to aspire to something far greater. Whether we enter it or not. Any other answer more specifically into our work would get obvious responses: we simply try, every time, to make the most important film possible. A film must change a life. At least the life of the person who make it. The responsibility lies in knowing that you have one».