121 When I ask her if, among the claims for respect, there is a struggle she feels deeply about, De Bruyckere therefore chooses to go beyond the -ism suffix label of any specific struggle: «I pay tribute to the people working in these arduous conditions, and to the material that inspires me». Respect for labour in arduous conditions, then – I cannot help but think of Satnam Singh, who paid with his life the bloody price of black labour and agrarian caporalism. Of his arm amputated and thrown into a fruit box, and of the body fragments created and redeemed by Berlinde De Bruyckere. But the one on Singh's body does not even come close to the function of sheltering rights proper to anti-art; the one on Singh's body is the rotten and toxic fruit of what the preliminary investigation judge defined as «inhuman conduct detrimental to the most basic values of respect and solidarity». The one on Singh's body is humanity's darkest hour. Respect for labour, we said, looking for a light again. From the industrial dynamics of the 20th century towards automation, up to the current AI drift all to be tamed, the tendency to set intellectual labour against manual labour has triggered a paradigm shift in the perception of the centrality of homo faber – including Cattelan-ian implications on who the real author of an artwork is, whether the artist who conceptually conceives it or the lender who materially realises it (and for the Supreme Court and for me, there is no doubt that it is the former). With De Bruyckere, the question does not even arise; her art means also her arm, the masterful manual gesture that leads her to sculpt the wax, to assemble the molds created, to melt them one on top of the other, to paint them layer upon layer. And respect for the material, a respect that is also recovery (hence, also a practice of sustainability): of skins rescued from slaughterhouses, of trees salvaged from storms, of wax melted and melted again to minimise waste and scrap. Of textiles such as pillows, sheets and blankets, collected at every latitude, which in the name of anti-art have gone through an anti-rhetorical evolution on her way. Thus, if the Blanket women of the 1990s found shelter under dim blankets, decorated with familial patterns and symbolising the most intimate sharing, and if in works such as 0.28 (2007) the stacks of blankets in the lower shelf of the vitrine were almost in comfort of the trunks placed on top, today this no longer makes sense. From Calais, to Cutro, to Buča, to Gaza, the blanket, and the social fabric of the satiated part of the world, has failed – on any Thursday evening in the last, too many months, a reportage on the desperate escape of the surviving Palestinians from Rafah starts. The line of cars is thick, and on each of those cars, crammed with the faces of the vanquished, on each of those luggage racks I recognise distinctly the same, identical patterns of the blankets that, in her work, have failed to provide shelter. And I understood what De Bruyckere means by exhibiting today only ragged blankets, subjected to the wear and tear of the outdoors for months. And it was a blow to the heart. Of second-hand furnishings that, from being a marginal function, become comprimariums. «It’s an intuitive and very physical process,» she explains to me, «of understanding what a work needs and what it might evoke in the viewer. In the studio, the works grow into their own habitat, they generate themselves in a way. Depending on how the sculptures evolve, for instance, it becomes clear what kind of habitat they require – whether it is a pillow or a table to support them, or a vitrine to encase them. This habitat is part of the work, it’s never just a means of presentation». To listen, even to that which has no capacity for speech. To try to understand its needs. In a word: to respect. The anti-rhetorical ability of De Bruyckere's art then passes through the anti-nostalgic and anti-romantic realisation that a large part of the world is artificial, with good grace to those who preach the anachronistic myth of a return to nature, but holding a smartphone
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