The body and the shelter. Contemporary art in defense of human rights

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May you have the body.
May I be your shelter.

 

The history of human rights walks with the bodies of human beings, and like the bodies it grows, like the bodies it gets injured but, like the bodies, it heals. As long as the bodies know how to take care of it. Words are a flywheel and, when bodies are able to choose them, they hold precious meanings. There is a very ancient legal establishment, dating back to the Holy Roman Empire and institutionalized starting from 1679 at the behest of Charles of England – cradle of the Common Law, of the inherent rights of men for the sole fact of being bodies – built on two symbolic and powerful words: it is the Habeas Corpus, may you have the body. In its name, in the eyes of the law, the body is inviolable and protected from abuse, law is sheltered from injustice, freedom can keep on walking, with bodies and within bodies, crossing the centuries.
Have your body, no one can ever arbitrarily take away the dignity and integrity of your person. Act by remaining faithful to them and, in their name, I will be your shelter.

The declarations of independence and the sources of law of every liberal order, the action of humanitarian organizations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, created by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, have been built on the Habeas Corpus’ foundation. The UN itself, signatory of the UDHR, took shape three years earlier, while bodies were rising again from the war, with the primary purpose of the international promotion of peace, therefore to widen shelter from the body to the bodies, to all the bodies, uniting the Habeas Corpus to the principle that every creed recognizes as the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you, fertile substratum of the Ethic of Reciprocity. And there is a subtle, yet huge difference between the positive and negative poles of the Golden Rule:

[+] do unto others as you would have them do unto you = the body of the Other as enrichment
[-] don’t do unto others as you wouldn’t have them do unto you = the body of the Other as a limit

corollary: in reciprocity, always polarize towards [+]

192 States belonging to the UN, each of them signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But human rights do not belong to the States, which, if anything, are their guarantors. In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the committee that wrote the Declaration, «Human rights begin in small places, close to home, so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person, the neighborhood he lives in, the school or college he attends, the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seek equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world». Human rights, then, belong to bodies. Also and above all to the bodies we do not see. To the forgotten bodies. To the used-up bodies, to the private bodies. To the unrecognized, unacknowledged or unclaimed bodies. To the bodies of those who demonstrate for other bodies. To the bodies played on the table of politics, to frighten, to silence. The Body of Christ and the body of every poor Christ. To the bodies of those who go through pain, suffering, darkness, which were the real theme of the referendum on euthanasia, recently rejected in Italy with the ridiculous alibi of a wrong syntax – as had already happened for the albeit bland draft law against homophobia named Zan Bill, because words, for bodies, can be the best ally but also the worst enemy, when one is not polarized towards [+]. How do you get close to a body in pain? What compassion with? What friendship with? By what right can someone else’s body be condemned without appeal? On his body I saw all the evil in the world, were the words of Giulio Regeni’s mother in front of the deposition of the body of the son, despoiled of the Habeas Corpus, of Pietas and still in search of rights. Perhaps, rather than a declaration of rights, we need a declaration of duties, because every time a right is denied, emptying it into sterile abstraction, someone has not done his duty.
The duty to defend every single body. With its unique story. With its unique skin.

Skin, sounding board and depth surface of every body, as Paul Valéry wrote: «The most profound thing about man is his skin». Skin as an interface with the world, through which to read and interpret the profound: and here it is, art, skin of the imaginary, in its symbolic and deeply ethical function of intermediary, alert, recall. Through the imagistic power of the symbol, main instrument of art acting like metaphor for language, art knows how to shake and awake, and skin, litmus of the world on the body, has always been a symbol of art and human rights.
The livid skin painted by Lucian Freud, and the distorted one by Francis Bacon.
The redeemed skin by Berlinde de Bruyckere, and the suspended one by Milena Altini.
The skin of the vanquished, told by Curzio Malaparte (The skin, 1943) as our true homeland because, when rights fall silent, skin becomes our only shelter. The Man Who Sold His Skin, by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, tells the story of a Syrian refugee who, in order to reunite with his girlfriend in Europe, decides to have a Schengen visa tattooed on his back in order to become «a commodity, a canvas, so now I can travel all around the world because, in the times we are living, the circulation of commodities is much freer than that of a human being». Admittedly inspired by the real skin of Tim Steiner, tattooed in 2006 by the artist Wim Delvoye and already sold for 150 thousand euros to the Reinking Collection in Hamburg, which will exhibit it right after his death, the movie offers a fertile ground for reflection on some rights present in Declaration – the right to freedom of movement, the right of asylum, freedom of expression, copyright, the right to equality – and unequally guaranteed, depending on the portion of the world within which, fortunately or regrettably, one is born. From Tim’s real skin to Sam’s fake one, art enhances reflection on the connection between body and human rights through the meaning of projects such as Made in Italy© – Handle with care (2015) by Mustafa Sabbagh – 27 portraits of young men by the sea, quintessentially place destined for the traffic of commodities and men, vulnerable in their body, in their skin and in their being exposed like products presented, in a commercial language, through their technical characteristics, origin, typology – or as Useless Bodies?, an exhibition at the Fondazione Prada by the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset, q uestioning the actual role of our bodies in the 21st century: dazzling white as if they were lifeless, but hyper-technological, downgraded to archives of data to be sold and resold to Big Techs.

In art, the work of a lifetime is known as body.
Wherever it feels that one right is absent or trampled, art becomes the body and the antibody.

Human rights themselves are a body, to be looked after, to be defended. Today, there is a precise word used to define the action of art in defense of human rights: that word is artivism. Coined in the late Nineties in the United States, a historic refuge for art exiles harassed by regimes from all latitudes, artivists are those artists who, especially in that period from South America, make art on their own skin, in protest, in revolt, in denunciation, viscerally calling into question their body, their history, their visions. Ultimately, artists capable of making their very life a work of art, because their vocation, when sincere, can only be that of an authentic call to arms arts:
«Even if unwittingly, we artists are involved. It is not struggle that makes us artists, but art that makes us struggle. By his very function the artist is the witness of freedom, and this is a motivation he is going to pay dearly. By his very function he is engaged in the most inextricable depths of history, where the very flesh of man suffocates» (Albert Camus, The Rebel: an essay on Man in revolt, 1951).

You see it is not that easy. You see it takes more than photographing yourself lying face down on the beach of Lesbos, because when you can feel the stench of shortcut in the face of an enormous engagement like that of art, from great dissident artist to pompous self-proclaimed artist, it’s a snap. You see that curating yet another climate change-themed exhibition is not enough if, at the omnipresent post-event banquet, it’s a triumph of plastic bottles and cups. You see that there is no need to pile up an art collection, and to baptize it with great fanfare in the name of protection of human rights, demanding to obtain artworks on free loan of artists who live solely on their art. You see that smudging lipstick on your face just long enough for those infamous fifteen minutes of fame won’t make you an artist with exquisite egalitarian sensibility. The original sin lies in believing that the extent of the commitment of a work of art can be calculated on the basis of an instant emotional impact, addressed only to the gut. That inspiration can be easily deduced from the news of the day. That engagement lies more in the title than in the strength of the work. And that portraying manneristically a human, social or political lack may be enough to declare themselves artists or, lost in delirium, artivists.
To be honest, the very word “artivism” gives me an early onset of urticaria, because a poorly self-critical critics always falls victim to the same traps: in this case, the trap given by the lust for definition, for a kind of neologist hyper-baptism, from the moment that – as masterfully described by Camus in the previous excerpt – if it is art, it is already by its very nature a powerful commitment, and using human rights as a sycophantic pretext means to rape them, and to rape art itself.
In my view, Judith beheading Holofernes (1612-13) by Artemisia Gentileschi is way more artivistic – or rather, artistic and therefore committed – than the umpteenth spread of red shoes placed in improbable venues of the contemporary; the Ecstasy of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1674) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini is much more artivistic – or rather, artistic and therefore committed – than yet another so-called performer who, by the mere fact of undressing himself, proclaims himself a revolutionary in front of an 118 audience elegantly bored and looking for yet another drink (in plastic). As capricious of freedom, and as f igural semi-illiterates, we often neglect to read the context within which a masterpiece becomes a body, which is such because it exceeds its time and makes itself eternal for the centuries to come, because it has crossed the contingency of its present and has decided to put itself at risk, if only for the defense of a freedom – the freedom of expression, art. 19 of the Declaration of Rights, a bulwark of art and culture – which, in its time, demanded help for its own body.
Can you imagine it?

[warning: what follows is nothing but a figment of the imagination]

From the personal correspondence of the secretary of the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Spain in Rome

Most illustrious and most reverend Lord,
This concept, which is talked about so much here in Rome, flows by word of mouth, but it is always whispered. They call it “freedom”. The painters dip the brush into it, the writers the pen, while sculptors and architects cut the stone with it, because it seems to be made of the hardest alloy. If I could, I would tell you that it is a trivial matter, a whim of the artist, a rêverie of the intellectual, but I cannot. It is rather a disease that there is no way to contain, because there seems to be no valid cure or confinement. Those who suffer from it burn more than expected, ready to embrace the flames of the stake rather than being cured. Concealers by nature are the artists of this papal court. Take for example Chevalier Bernini. Many have raised objections to the works of this artist, since he had right begun to make himself known for his merits. Still many here in Rome, to tell the truth, think that some of them are very lacking in decorum, especially those which can be seen in sacred places, but truth has already been discovered by time, and we are all completely enraptured by this obscenity, called “freedom to create”. We laugh at the crowned heads that the Chevalier traces quickly in his journals, as the portrayed Cardinals do. We pretend to censor the soft f lesh of the females that he draws out from the marbles, we feel we have to reproach the eccentricities of his architecture and so forth, but truth be told we crave for this freedom, and we can never do without. I profess it is too late, I profess that censures, fines, reprimands and prisons are henceforth helpless. Most illustrious and most reverend Lord and my Master, I tell you with guilt and unspeakable delight that we all are, by now, vanquished and lost.

in Rome, January 23, 1640

 

Nothing forbids us to imagine that it could really have gone this way, although these lines are nothing more than a Pindaric flight, played in an attempt to convey the salience of an artistic act that, considered in its context and in view of the advocated achievement of human rights, really had something disruptive. The path towards the conquest of freedoms and rights enshrined in the 1948 Declaration was therefore able to advance also thanks to the contribution of the scandalous Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and of many other scandalously enlightened artists like him who, thanks to their art, were able to move forward the fragile bar of freedoms, by virtue of their very ability to imagine, to foresee, to create, to risk, always remaining faithful to themselves and to art, the real one. The discriminating factor is not then in defining oneself, more or less free of charge, as an artivist, nor are you making the history of human rights by launching yet another pompous exhibition entitled The female gaze, throwing anything into it as long as it comes from a vagina holder and handling the gender q uestion in the same way the infamous quotas for women, or the pandas at the zoo, are still handled. The strength of art, and its disruptive and very powerful ability to enter the debate and allow thought to advance on the subject of rights, can only stay in art itself, and not in personalisms, not in hashtags, or worse still in marketing operations designed to maintain the status quo of a frankly worn-out system: «Today, the exponential multiplication of exhibitions and biennials exploiting themes such as ecology, gender and the racial question as a showcase of liberal emancipation should be read in terms of an art-washing process only tending to reaffirm art as an autocratic system of capital, functional to the reproduction of social hierarchies and to the maintenance of order» (Marco Scotini, in Cos’è la curatela oggi, Artribune, 03 01 2022). Talking about the contribution of art to human rights, it is ultimately not a question of riding on humanitarian emergencies, but rather of knowing how to foresee them, of scandalizing – where scandal does not mean provocation for its own sake, but rather for shining a light wherever one is forced to silence, aware that «Wherever there is darkness, a miracle is always 119 slumbering» (Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter, 2021), if only one has the power to imagine it.

And it cannot be lowered from above, and it cannot be permeated by the stale stench of paternalism: in order to be able to question tired preconceptions, art must be made by artists. «If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution», wrote the anarchist essayist Emma Goldman in her autobiography.

When, in 1968, the MET – Metropolitan Museum of New York decided to curate a very nice and very white exhibition on Afro-American art entitled Harlem on my mind, as if we were talking about a distant memory and not about a living and burning reality, the protest flared up due to the inability to worthily represent a humankind that asked above all for respect and competence. Eight years later, at the LACMA – Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Driskell curated Two Centuries of African American Art, and suddenly the world realized that African Americans had a very important lineage in visual arts.
Almost in parallel, in 1977, at the Los Angeles City Hall shopping center, the artist Suzanne Lacy gave life to the performance Three Weeks in May, going daily to the Central Police Station to find out the number and location of rapes occurred in town during the previous day. For each of them, a red and definitive RAPE was stamped by the artist at the exact place of the crime, on a large map of the city posted in the shopping center, accompanied by nine other RAPEs less loaded with ink, whose presence was legitimized by the statistics of the time: in those years, in fact, domestic abuses were not punishable, and only one in ten was reported by the victim. During those three weeks in May, the map turned inexorably red. After a short time, domestic violence in Los Angeles County inexorably became a crime.

«Beauty as salvation. Consequence: cleansing beauty from hedonism
– and salvation from sanctimony».
(Lalla Romano, In extreme seas, 1987)

Beauty is art, an aesthetic experience which, as salvation, contains ethics, therefore rights; and it is not sterile hedonism, cosmetic anaesthetics, useless decorum. Which means that beauty, when it is not burdened by sanctimony, also contemplates the aesthetics of the uncanny, of the different, of discomfort, of the Other by itself.
It is the matter of art from Egon Schiele onwards, corroborated by Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) according to which, after the barbarism of Auschwitz, it is more urgent than ever for the function of art to pass from contemplation to reflection, through two fundamental dynamic moments: the rupture and the irruption of the Other.
Only in this way will art be able to save.
Only by welcoming the Other will we be able to save ourselves.
Although great contemporary art is not designed to give answers, but to raise questions where for many it is more convenient not to question, its example, in this sense and translated into the field of human rights, is enormous.

«I believe in the power of beauty. In my opinion, beauty is based on the convergence of an aesthetic thought and an ethical principle. For this reason, I still believe that art can change a society. I still believe that a good exhibition or a good theatrical piece can heal the wounds in the mind of a spectator. I still believe, as an artist, that viewers’ bodies and minds can be awakened. Therefore, first of all, I feel the need to look inside myself, to understand what I represent for society, what it means to be human for society, where we can place ourselves as human beings, through work, thought, the traces to be left through visual art or writing. And obviously the next step is that some artworks need to communicate, others refuse to communicate, because even some artworks’ refusal to communicate represents a historical decision, it speaks of a historical position. Perhaps some artworks do not want to communicate because they do not want to be included in the society of the spectacle. By “spectacle”, I mean the spectacle of economy, trade, inflation both of image and culture, but an artist must be like Prometheus, who stole the source of life, he stole it from the gods to give it to men and made them capable of creating their own life», writes the contemporary artist and dramaturg Jan Fabre (in Parallelo42_08 Pensiero, 2008). We need heroes, now!, was the invocation that repeatedly pierced the scene of his Prometheus Landscape (2011). The current, ravenous need for heroes probably responds to a path of the humankind which proceeds hand in hand with the path of science and technology, both saturating our imagination to the point that, as in every parable of vice, we do not need nothing, so we do need everything. While in the global south human rights substantially coincide with the Sustainable Development Goals set by the UN 2030 Agenda – including the right to water, to land, to health, the fight against hunger and poverty – on this side of the world, sated and unsatisfied, we discuss the opportunity for the promulgation of a fourth generation of rights, consequential to new needs that burst into the contemporary and that are mostly induced by our condition, embracing the words of Marcuse, of one dimensional men: that of consumers.
But the Declaration of Human Rights cannot be reduced to the, albeit legit, Consumer Code. Heroism does not work on consumption. The dignity of bodies is not on the market. Recovering a phrase that has entered history on the subject of rights – and, specifically, the right to work and to gender equality – associated with a banner posted during the strike of the textile female workers of four factories in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912: We want bread, but we want roses too.

 

Panem et rosas. Once again, the strength of the symbol, which is the nourishment of art. And there is another symbol risen to flag of the free state of human rights, under which the body, asking for freedom of self-determination, and the bodies, asking for peace once and for all, seek shelter. A symbol discussed both in the Bible, in physics manuals, and in those of art history, whose figurative representation appeared for the first time in medieval illuminated manuscripts to reach, full of imagery, 1978 – the year in which the artist Gilbert Baker, on the occasion of the Gay Pride parade in San Francisco, delivered it to the history of human rights, creating the first Rainbow Flag. In this arc of time, to represent this arc of refracted light, there is the whole history of art: a symbol of the covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh (Genesis 9: 12-15) for Christian art, and allegory of justice with Christ circumscribed within it during the Judgment; emblem of peace, and specifically of that between Catholics and Protestants, in the Allegory of Catherine de’ Medici as Juno by Léonard Limosin (1573), where a rainbow pulls the triumphal chariot of the queen mother of France, promoter of the Peace of Saint Germain; source of art itself for Angelika Kauffmann (Color, 1780); metaphor of the extra/ordinary beauty of nature in Romanticism; profound sense of the Sublime as Delightful Horror (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757), whose research is constant for the human striving for the Absolute, in Shaker rainbow (1998) by Wolfgang Tillmans, an artist whose commitment to safeguarding human rights speaks the universal language of a harsh, rough and deeply cultured photograph, often amplified through the powerful dialogues triggered by his diptychs, where the unusual beauty of a double rainbow’s refracted light shakes a glimpse so usual as to seem presage; until today, the day when we can find a permanent rainbow at coordinates 56°09’14.2″N 10°11’58.7″ E. It is there, in fact, that in 2011 Ólafur Elíasson – contemporary artist always attentive to the effects of human behavior on natural balance, who like a demiurge creates enchanting environmental installations combining art with science – crowned the ARoS – Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Aarhus, Denmark, with Your Rainbow Panorama, a suspended circular glass gallery walkable on each of its 150 meters, whose purpose is to perceptually eliminate the separation between inside and outside, framed in a sky with the colors of a rarefied and psychedelic rainbow. Distinguishable even from a great distance, the installation also serves as an orientation and a lighthouse for those looking at it from the outside. Orientation and lighthouse, as with the models of life. In the summer of 2021, UEFA rejected the request to illuminate the Allianz Arena in Munich with the colors of the rainbow, during the cup match Germany – Hungary, alleging the reason that the gesture would have been read as a deliberate criticism against the homophobic legislation in force in Hungary. Answer: yes, it was. Yes, the rainbow has become a political symbol, as much as art itself is. And yes, we absolutely need it. Immersed as we are into the era of the domination of images, of the saturation of signs (= semiotic pollution) and of the deprivation of dreams ( = anaesthesia of the imaginary), we need images and symbols full of meaning, that can be orientation and lighthouse as gestures can, as it can be even just dressing free from the fear, even today, of an assault. In defense of human rights, we need symbols. We have always needed them.

[warning: what follows is nothing but a figment of the imagination]

My dear Eloise,
there are thirty minutes to midnight, and outside there is the Revolution. For Freedom and Equality, they say.
Here in the Rue de la Mortellerie barricades have been erected, the smoke of the shots fired is still suspended in the air and the pavement is torn and stained by the blood of the rioters. Like others, I have witnessed the clashes from the windows. Even if your absence reassures me that nothing will happen to you, it weighs on me nonetheless.
But yesterday, from those same windows, I saw the rainbow.
So I opened the closet and started taking out your things. I put on your gray muslin dress that you often wear on hot days like this, when we go for a walk, and on the hat I pinned the tricolor cockade. With a veil I covered my face, and my hands with satin gloves. I went down the stairs in the dark and hesitated in front of the door, which was already half open. Slowly, one step in front of the other, I then went out. There was no one. The road was devastated. I walked a few meters towards the Confiserie and stopped in the middle of the road. A deep breath, I turned, and retraced my steps. Now I’m back here, sitting at the desk, looking at your dress 121 that I put on the bed. There is a stain of blood on the hem of the skirt, but it does not sadden me at all because I think that one day I know that from today I am finally free.
Yesterday I saw the rainbow, and I realized that our freedom is us.

With love, your Pierre.
Paris, (illegible), 1789

 

More than two centuries have passed since this non-real, but still so real missive. Let’s stay in Paris. It is 2001. UNESCO, United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, gathered in its thirty f irst session, unanimously approves the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity as a common heritage of humankind. In article 1 we read: «Culture takes diverse forms across time and space. This diversity is embodied in the uniqueness and plurality of the identities of the groups and societies making up humankind. As a source of exchange, innovation and creativity, cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature». And article 2 points out: « […] Cultural pluralism gives policy expression to the reality of cultural diversity. Indissociable from a democratic framework, cultural pluralism is conducive to cultural exchange and to the flourishing of creative capacities that sustain public life». From diversity to pluralism stands the space consumed between real and ideal, between how it is and how it should be. From diversity to pluralism stagnates the still too vast distance that separates tolerance from welcoming. And it’s not just a matter of a subtle difference in attitude. God is not to be prayed just by beating one’s own chest, God is to be welcomed.

Once again, the enormous importance of art related to human rights lives in its being a universal language, capable of both bringing together distant cultures and reclaiming forgotten or, worse still, deliberately erased identities. This is why art has often given a voice to those who have been forced, in coerced silence, to leave their country to see their rights as human beings respected. The difference between tolerance and welcoming lies in knowing how to lend a hand first and unconditionally. In Where we come from (2001-2003), the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, holder of an American passport, does nothing but ask a simple question to Palestinians like her, who live in cities far away in the world like her but who, unlike her, can no longer return to Palestine: If I could do something for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be? We enter her silent installation on tiptoe, we see her crossing physical and psychological boundaries on behalf of others, on behalf of others carrying out small yet, evidently, immense actions – eating a traditional dish in a given place, carrying flowers to a grave, paying a bill – not always succeeding, but always reporting the story of each of the people involved, to connect herself to them, to reconnect themselves one to each other, to connect ourselves to them. The work of the Danish artist Danh Vō, of Vietnamese origin, combines the themes of capitalism, colonialism and religion with an investigation into the actual state of the art of universal human rights, bonding them to intimate personal narratives – what he calls the tiny diasporas of a person’s life. In 1979, when he was 4, his family fled Vietnam on a makeshift boat and was rescued by a Danish ship. Vō Rosasco Rasmussen (2002 – ongoing) is a project that documents Danh Vō’s marriages; a project started with the marriage with two of his dear friends, first Mia Rosasco, then Mads Rasmussen. A project still pursued nowadays, in which Danh Vō keeps on choosing to marry – and, almost immediately, to divorce – with people without a residence permit, indicated to him by his family or friends, helping them and at the same time relating themes such as colonialism and migration to his own identity as a migrant, as a gay, as a human. The only residue of these events is the permanent extension on his documents of his legal name, first definition of a person, symptomatic of how much bureaucracy can affect an individual’s self-determination, often leading to conform instead of exercising a sacrosanct right of choice. «One day Pia Klemp, anti-fascist activist for human and animal rights and commander of ships on a humanitarian mission, received the following email: Hello Pia, I’ve read about your story in the papers. You sound like a badass. I am an artist from the UK and I’ve made some work about the migrant crisis, obviously I can’t keep the money. Could you use it to buy a new boat or something? Please let me know. Well done. Banksy. Despite the appearance, it was no joke: and today the boat exists, and it is operational. And its dedication to Louise Michel (1830-1905), an extraordinary figure of French anarchist who spent a lifetime for women’s right to education, without ever yielding to male domination, gives an idea of the degree of cultural awareness of the operation. Banksy’s letter to Pia Klemp should feature in any 21st-century artistic literature anthology. The central conceptual junction is this: “I have made works about migrants, and obviously I can’t keep that money. So I have to invest it for migrants”. In several murals scattered around the world Banksy represented the humanity of migrants, their thirst for justice, their persecution. The purpose of these works is profoundly political: they serve not to make sleep all those good people convinced that they live in democratic and lawful States. […] So today those who want to see, in this part of summer, a true work of art – in deep communion with the sea, with human nature and with Politics with a capital P – can look, in the ports of Southern Italy, for the Louise Michel. Finding it, it might even happen to him to find himself again» (Tomaso Montanari,  L’arte e la storia sono politica: Banksy e la nave per I migranti, emergenzacultura.org, 31 08 2020).

The shrewdest ones will tell me that these are just performances.
And I will answer them that this time, when faced with the defense of bodies, I am more interested in the final result of the act, than of the artwork.
Beyond the 30 rights enshrined in the Declaration, sometimes being incoherent is itself a right.

trentunesimo articolo
(o del diritto alla speranza)

right to body right to cure right to care right to self-determination right to imperfection right to travel right to choice right to fluidity right to melting pot right to shade right to green right to sea right to aeasth/etics right to elegance (not just in fabrics) pursuit of happiness right to kindness right to humanity right to failure right to doubt right to time right to age right to end right to lightness right to heroism (ordinary and extraordinary) right to resistance right to future right to history right to memory right to ancientness right to out-of-fashion right to invisibility right to quiet right to slowness right to concentration right to eccentricity right to the Third Landscape right to comprehension right to reflection right to reverse right to respect right to dissent right to sense right to nonsense right to change right to incoherency right to imagination right to art.

 

It starts here, with this first panoramic view of the sea which is always hope, a path of reflection by Ossigeno on the intimate relationship between human rights and contemporary art, between the body and the shelter, deeply convinced that art and culture, united with development of critical thinking, can save. That they are, now and always, the body’s safest shelter, and humanity’s greatest line of defense.

Dear anonymous,– like that I take the liberty of calling you, not knowing who you will be when you will come into the world – the year is 2022, and I am on a mission for you. War is in the air on the eastern front, and pestilence everywhere in the world; you will excuse me, therefore, if at the moment I do not propose myself as a model of optimism. But there is a way out, there always is, if only one knows how to imagine it. Imagination, when accompanied by a lucid capacity for analysis, always means salvation. As I write to you, I get news of the words with which Russian artists have communicated their renunciation of participation in the next Biennale of Contemporary Art, in that symbol of resistance that has always been the city of Venice. In protest, they say. For civil engagement, they respond. «There is no place for art, when civilians die in rocket fire», they say. I strongly have to disagree: the place of art is right there, in trenches. The place of art is in the defense outpost. The place of art is in the refuge from the atrocities of war and abuse, from the forced silence of human rights, and it is not by responding to silence with silence that will we be able to say we are sheltered. Art has the task of shaking us with all the strength it is capable of, to ask that all horror may be silent. In the constant anxiety of identifying a disposable enemy, to be quickly replaced according to a hypocritical contingency, today it is all that is Soviet to be in the crosshairs – a few hours ago the news was made that in Milan someone tried to cancel a literature course on Dostoevsky – but it is never by cancelling culture that humanity can be said to be safe, on the contrary. Beauty will save the world, only if the world will be capable of saving beauty. There is, in Berlin, a city that has decided to come to terms with its burdensome past, a museum – the Ethnologisches Museum, within the Humboldt Forum – which, rather than hiding them in the depths of its warehouses like dust hided under carpets, exposes the barbarity committed during the German occupation in Africa, not lacking in telling it in a fluid speech that is a lucid, accurate mea culpa. This is what culture should always do: it should always tell evil, and not erase it, because that’s the only way it can be neutralized. It is only in this way that we can finally say that we are free, and I cannot imagine what can make us free and aware more than art and culture.

If you ever read these words of mine, come and see me. The address is on the envelope.