123 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. thirty-first article (or of the right to hope) 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.
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