119 I would start by saying that talking about respect, when it comes to rights, is like talking about oxygen when it comes to breathe: indispensable. I would continue by saying that talking about art, when it comes to respect for rights, is like talking about mould when it comes to medicine: unexpected and enlivening (see under 'discovery of penicillin'). Ossigeno's path in the defence of rights by contemporary art, this time, takes a more inclusive route. This time we do not walk in the furrow of a single right. This time we go to the lymph of each and every one: because every enshrined right, without respect, is but a dead letter. The view becomes panoramic, from the singularity to the plurality of rights and bodies, of all bodies. Universal Declaration of Human Rights: let’s broaden the field, let’s go beyond 'human'. This time the pivot, as for respect, lies in 'universal'. And these lines speak of art. And contemporary art has found its most shining systematisation in Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory according to which, since the barbarity of Auschwitz, to say nothing of some winds currently blowing from the west and impregnating storms, no return is possible, it isn’t, but an act of respect for universal life is: contemporary art then has a duty to become anti-art, magnifying through its gesture the aesthetics of discomfort, the sanctity of the different, respecting the call for a revolution gentle in its manners, but detonating in its aim of blowing up a conformism that is no longer admissible. The above are the reasons why, when I was informed of the baptism of respect as the backbone of this issue of Ossigeno, I strongly wished for a name above all others as symbol-artist, because no one knows how to sing respect for the universal body more than she does; because no one, more than she does, leads an anti-rhetorical path made up of seductive, uncanny and constructive visions. Berlinde De Bruyckere (Gent, Belgium, 1964), in the words of Eugenio Viola, «has developed over the years a distinctive stylistic research, based on an aesthetics of the laceration that draws on the mythology of a body placed at the crossroads of multiple referents, both cultural and aesthetic. Her sculptures act on a physical level on the skin of images, and on a psychic level on the dimension of the symptom, physical and mental, on the springs of the repressed. Any subject, in her sculpture, becomes an expression of a hallucinated and suspended physiology». The first thing one has to define for a journey is the geography of places, and it is precisely in the geography of that suspension that Viola speaks of, in that terrain vague between beauty and disturbance, that Berlinde De Bruyckere chooses to steer this journey of ours as well. «What I want to achieve is for people not to look at my work as something beautiful» she says. «I want to touch them where they are afraid to be touched. To address those things they do not find the words for. I don’t expect that to always be a smooth process. Some people will take offense or will object to certain materials I employ. Take for instance the animal skins I source to mold. These hides come straight from the abattoir where the animals were flayed for mass meat consumption and their skins were thrown into large containers. In that moment they don’t belong to anyone; nor to the animals from whom they were robbed, nor to those who will gather, inspect and, by labelling, attribute value to them in the context of future leather production. This non-zone is interesting for me. Exactly because of the brutality of the act, I feel the need to somehow redeem what is considered worthless, disposable». It is the non-zone of the margin, and of the marginalised, that which De Bruyckere identifies as her favourite terrain of exploration and most in need of respect, that Third
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