«It’s not my fault». «They misconstrued me». «I’m a victim of circumstance». New mantras of an age, ours, in which the throne stands empty, as our tragic everyman Fantozzi knows all too well. In an excursus on the Imperative of Responsibility and its disappearance – from Netflix to Jonas – Raffaele Alberto Ventura maps out a way forward: to reclaim it. Always.
At the Museum of Empathy you literally walk in someone else’s shoes, but metaphorically, you step into the future: the one we’ll leave to our descendants. Roman Krznaric invites us to become good ancestors, cultivating an alternative view and nurturing our acorn-brain. From carpe diem to carpite diem: let’s seize the moment, and let’s do it together.
Responsibility is the fire of art. And art seems to have forgotten it. But the D’Innocenzo Brothers walk through the flames, between lacerating poetry and images disturbingly beautiful. Among the most acclaimed and essential voices in contemporary international cinema, their work is cerebral concussion. In the age of comfort and cringe, they remind us: the most guilty risk is not risking at all.
The Food Forest Ketelbroek is the beating heart of a new ecology of thought. Emile van der Staak moves through it with the radical vision of botanical gastronomy: fewer animals, more plants, more future, radical responsibility and imagination. From Chinese mahogany to the inner rhythm of the forest, every creation is a political act. And here, to seduce means to transform.
He’s the organic farmer who revolutionised delivery (and the entire agricultural system) in the UK: Guy Watson created Riverford by challenging markets, profits, and conventions. True luxury is knowing where to put down roots: today the company is 100% employee-owned. A political act, before a business one. Because responsibility, when it’s a choice and not a reflex, is something you share.
Mestizaje Rebelde is the reference locution for what happens to food cultures in the global South, historically despoiled until two fighting chefs decided to confront the system. Their story, through their voices.
No one, more than she, knows how to mold respect for life, beyond its skin. No one, more than she, creates beauty from the non-zone of the margin. On a journey between respect and its opposite, O13 meets Berlinde De Bruyckere.
«Beneath our feet is a miracle», writes the award-winning Guardian columnist, essayist and environmental activist George Monbiot, for the opening act of Ossigeno 12. But if we cannot know the reasons for miracles for they are supernatural, nothing is more natural than the soil, which we do not know only because of our guilty neglect. Between data and enchantment, Monbiot tells us that miracle of life and vitality that is soil.
Like his Renaissance namesake, a great artist at the court of the Este family, Lorenzo Costa paints new morphologies by shaping the soil with water. An Italian pioneer of permaculture, his practice responds to three imperatives – to slow down, to distribute, to infiltrate – by listening to and respecting the land of Chianti and cultivating, like his fellow countryman Leonardo, the spark of experimentation.
Yesterday an academic background in Agricultural Sciences, today one of the most acclaimed artists on the international scene. Ossigeno 12 met Carsten Höller, who took us on a path - the one of his unmistakable imagery - to investigate the shelter offered by his art both to the human right to the land, and to the sacrosanct rights of the land.