80 81 What happens then is that – if confronted with an irresponsible museum art that has made itself so comfortable, on those censed walls, that it has defused itself, satisfied with its self-congratulatory caption and its pompous press release, with the mansplaining attitude of those who pretend to come and explain something while prudently keeping their distance – other contemporary art territories seem to me infinitely more receptive, more courageous, less egotistical, more aware that, in order to wake you up, you have to be disturbed. Just as Dostoyevsky’s The demons, Pasolini’s Salò, Fassbinder’s Fox and his friends are unbearable, the first time I read Walter Siti and Nicola Lagioia I felt unsettled. Experiencing a Romeo Castellucci theatre work is like crashing head-on; you know you’re going in risking something, thank goodness. Childish Gambino’s This Is America, both track and video, destabilise. And Caligari and Garrone and Cronenberg and Lanthimos (especially the pre-Hollywood-budget Lanthimos, as was the case with Almodóvar – for the function of roots is to keep you grounded...). What I am trying to say is that, while the overwhelming majority of visual art today remains hung on walls, looking down from above on a more and more burning world, much more of contemporary music, literature, and cinema are willing to walk through the fire, to get dirty, to get frayed in the complexity of the zeitgeist, to face the abyss head-on, to responsibly tell the story of the other than itself – with the welcoming sense of those who understand it, the hope of those who still believe in it, the care of those who respect it in every single detail. And so, when I was told that the theme of this issue of Ossigeno would have been responsibility, the willingness to bring Damiano and Fabio D'Innocenzo onto these pages was instant. For they know how to fleshly self-tell and story-tell, always assuming the responsibility for their vision. For they are authors of some of the best writing – from poetry (My mother is a weapon, transl.) to screenwriting (not just for their own feature films, but also, for instance, for Dogman by Matteo Garrone; and I won’t be going here into all the awards they’ve won, because for that there’s Wikipedia & co., and because from these pages I always prefer to focus on the thought that substantiates the palmares of every extraordinary artist I met) – but also of the best photography (Night Pharmacy, transl.), and of the best cinema of our consumed times, taking care of it without any discounted leniency, rejecting the cheap sell-out in deferential favour of the mainstream consensus. But there’s another reason why I felt the D'Innocenzo Brothers, born 37 years ago on the same day as the storming of the Bastille – in a way, called to revolution since birth – were perfect for a conversation about the responsibilities of contemporary art: because one of them is the ability to comprehend the other. And they are twins who love each other profoundly, and I believe that no one could be able, better than twins, to know what it means to bear the cross and the delight of welcoming the other out of oneself, of protecting him, of respecting him even more than one is willing to protect and respect oneself: «Having a twin makes you more attuned to listen to the pain of another. I have an image in my mind – the summer sea and us two as children, Damiano overwhelmed by a wave, and me, suddenly alone. I must have turned around twenty times looking for him, imagining life without him. When he resurfaced, he was laughing, and I could barely breathe», Fabio told Angelo Carotenuto during a 2020 interview. And I realise that, for the sake of uniqueness, each of their works is not signed Damiano and Fabio, but D’Innocenzo Brothers. An unlimited liability company, as they are shouldering the heavy, but redemptive, responsibility for contemporary art. responsibility of context: the hunger - Did you like it? - Touching. - Then why aren’t you crying? - I don’t feel like crying... - ‘cause you’re no good at engaging. – from Boys cry, directed by the D'Innocenzo Brothers, 2018 The D'Innocenzo Brothers immerse themselves and us in contexts they do know well, the first responsibility towards art and the very essence of being in the world, for interpretation without knowledge is presumption. Born in Rome, in the Tor Bella Monaca district, they grew up following their fisherman father's moves along the Lazio coast. They graduated from the catering college as a safety net, hungry from a very young age for culture and countercultures, which they fed on as autodidacts. There is nothing, in their suburbia portrayal, of all that porno-aestheticizing rubbish flirting between paternalistic romanticisation and gratuitous discomfort, far easier for generalists and armchair critics to judge and digest despite its complexity. It is life growing at the margins – within abandoned and teeming dormitory-blocks, or in terraced-blocks with inflatable tubs and similar plasticised pseudo-status-symbols – that takes centre stage in their work. Life pulsates raw, and uncomfortable, and no good at engaging, unwilling to take full responsibility for its actions, for it is too hungry. But there it shines, at the margins, ungraceful and disgraced and full of grace, in Mirko and Manolo devouring their chicory pizza and then chomping on chicory-flavoured chewing gums (Boys cry, 2018); in Viola, wearing a synthetic wig because she got lice, staring at her raided birthday cake (Bad tales, 2020); in Ambra, fluorescent in her jacket and eyes, gorging herself on chocolate bombs while asking her father what he wants to be when he grows up (Dostoevskij, 2024). Human beings in a perpetual all-you-can-eat mode, cats hissing when a hand gets too close, electric bodies in acetate tracksuits, tightrope walkers stretched on life’s passacaglia rope (please, also listen to the soundtracks carefully selected by the Brothers, with Città Notte by Egisto Macchi being one of the most significant, contexts enhancing the context) who, totally unaware, carry the full load of their disturbing splendour. It is a majestically curated neo-neorealism, made up of a phrasing of frames that range from asphyxial, like the eyes of surveillance cameras, to artistical, like Hopper's nocturnes of incommunicability. It is a majestically sharp neo-neorealism, populated by low-cost dreams and micro-ambitions of unworthy clichés, given a horizon that goes no further than a black screen that both feeds and starves, a pre-packaged enough [the original Boys cry title is Land of Enough, Editor’s Note] skin-embedded in flesh brains stomachs of their starving demigods. Yet, I believe that hunger is essential, as fear is, as long as one is strong enough to change its sign, far beyond certain top-down requalification projects (a dangerous word, it smacks of recolonisation). Art itself is born of hunger and fear: at Lascaux the human being, not knowing how else to exorcise them, scratched his hunger and fears onto the walls.
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