I then ask the Brothers about the responsibility of the context, the burden of geography, on the person, and the worth they give to personal responsibility stands out immediately: "We are convinced that it is the people who define a place, not the other way round, as is commonly thought. If there is a correlation between a place and its inhabitants, the infection is spread by them. There is no direct causal link, where direct means clear and therefore comforting. We are always displaced by how terrible things can happen in unsuspected places. But we are equally struck by how similar tragedies happen in easily predictable, almost predestined contexts. So where is the difference? Only in the gaze. If one looks at a suburb with the gaze of a saint posing the feet on a compromised ground, praying for those who live there, one will be predisposed to an open-and-shut, dogmatic, sucker rhetoric. Romanticising a place has the same effect as condemning it: both are based on ignorance of what you are really looking at. We did not look, but by standing inside, we covered our gaze, and there, in those moments, we absorbed so much». If the image is the scandal of seeing, what the gaze constantly stumbles over, and if our relation to images is now the pathological one of bulimia, then the gaze must be held responsible. «The process of digestion conditions everything, obviously. We’ve seen the ugly in the beauty, the beauty in the ugly, the beauty in the beauty, and the ugly in the ugly. Then we realised that defining things is idiotic. So we don’t think it’s bad luck to be born in a complicated suburb. It’s just a fact. And overturning facts is a task we’ve chosen for ourselves. Both in what we do and in the origin of why we do it – and in theory, we shouldn’t be appointed to this role». responsibility of formation: the error «When we are told, “You’re all self-taught”: that’s the only way. When school becomes the first step towards conformity, everything becomes very, very, very dangerous». – Manuel Agnelli, Leoni per Agnelli: musica per gli occhi. Damiano e Fabio D’Innocenzo, Radio 24, 2024 To overturn facts, to know how to see beyond a posture of resignation that sounds like comfort and instead to take on the responsibility of a role one shouldn’t be appointed to, as Raffaele Alberto Ventura states in his editorial for this issue of Ossigeno, and as the Brothers say: this is what the artist does in an almost ignored way – yet history teaches that when politics has listened to art, it has regenerated life – through a responsible gaze and a fertile and hungry imagery, to be nurtured like fruitful soil. When I ask Damiano and Fabio what images have shaped their own imagery, I am stunned by their answer: «We do have many references, fiercely contradictory ones: Pedro Costa, Romano Scarpa, William Gaddis and Vollmann, Charles D’Ambrosio, John Barth’s The floating opera, Upton Sinclair, Federigo Tozzi, Paolo Volponi, Antonio Moresco, Ivano Ferrari, Milo De Angelis, Bruno Enna, Tommaso Landolfi, Giuseppe Berto, Piero Chiara, Don Rosa, Giorgio Manganelli, Richard Ford’s Sportswriter, Schulz, Gombrowicz, Papini, Morselli, Ageev, Bilenchi, D’Arrigo, Delany, Pizzuto, Sciarrone». The Brothers claim the references of their imagery as a contradictory pantheon – from the most fervent creed to the most agnostic curse, from childish pastels to mature noir – but that is not the point, for among others it was Pasolini in Pigsty who established the vital need for contradiction. What impresses me is that, out of a secular rosary of 29 beads, only one is a director, five are cartoonists, while 23 are writers and poets. Twenty-three out of twenty-nine, roughly eighty per cent. Their imagery is made of words. The Brothers are telling me that for an artist imagination, beyond prefabricated images, means constant formation and constant struggle, which Fabio and Damiano form by transforming words into their powerful images. In truth, their work can be read as a declaration of love for writing through their own writing, visionary and flawed and tender and complex and sublime, made up of a wild, uncoordinated, uncompromised lexicon. As in the diary penned in green ink by a little girl in Bad tales, that sparks a raw and tragic rêverie in the Greek dramaturgical sense. As in My mother is a weapon, which preserves the same childlike stupor in claiming that writing means existing. As in the syncopated, fraternal dialogue that counterpoints the photographic tableaux in Night Pharmacy. Thus, in Dostoevskij, an unsustainable confession is sustained by an epistolary relationship as a mutual Stockholm syndrome, skilfully dosed words that tear at you in their feral heralds. What the Brothers write and shape is a microcosm populated by striking role overturnings – overturning facts is a task we’ve chosen for ourselves, they confessed a few lines ago – starting with the implosion of a Norman-Rockwell-painting family in front of the actual complexity, where the only ones who seem to have a sharp vision and a strong sense of responsibility are the children, taciturn good-mannered reflective beautiful and burdened with responsibilities that are not their own. But which they assume. In this microcosm the children are not merely watching us, as for the neorealist movie title, but they write and tell, bearing the responsibility both of the gaze and of the words – which, as all too often is forgotten, are stones. Thus, returning to our slabbed macrocosm, the fundamental moment of formation – of both a child and an artist – stands in opposition to a homologising scholastic and academic (de)formation that machetes art lessons, which is the cause of a kind of transgenic mutation transforming the art atelier into an onanistic clubhouse. A standardised procedure coming from a ministry of education and merit, whatever, which suspends teachers such as Christian Raimo, guilty of telling the importance of being partisan. Consequently, when given the chance to choose, Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo chose to go it alone, to assume responsibility for the formation of their own imagery, with results that made the world open its mouth wide. But, as if to prove how fundamental formation is, when they were not yet able to choose, they came across the exception that proves the rule – because, yes, there are also shining examples that, from time to time, allow us to breathe again, to make peace with humankind. So it is that, in the grunge years, in a school complex on the fringes of Rome, the teacher Antonio Bernardini reads with pride and satisfaction to his first-grade class the canonical composition What is your father’s job? in which the pupil D’Innocenzo Damiano, to explain that their father was then running a boatyard, writes: My father closes the sea. Reading it superficially, one might dismiss it as an error; but delving deeper – the first great lesson of that saintly teacher Antonio Bernardini – it is one of the most touching things I have ever read. So it is that, in the grunge years, in a school complex on the fringes of Rome, the teacher Antonio Bernardini throws to hell the formality of meagre merit criteria and teaches his pupils that an error is such only if you confine yourself to a superficial reading, without taking the responsibility of going deeper, thereby forming 86 87
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