the undoubtedly receptive pupils D’Innocenzo Damiano and D’Innocenzo Fabio to the disruptive power of imagination and the profound power of words – and it makes me smile to know that, for many years, Damiano’s password for everything, by his own admission, was antoniobernardini. If error is a formative moment often more enlightening than the canon, if a child can write My father closes the sea and learn that therein lies a sense far more vital than the one propagandised by the one-dimensional, insipid, and insidious formalism – and, worse still, by productivity as the only imperative – the lesson to be learnt is that one should always assume personal responsibility for one’s own lateral formation, for no ministerial programme plans to teach you the importance of error as regeneration and imagination as best practice. Thus, I would like to know from Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo what their first lesson would be, if they were entrusted with the responsibility of forming young lives in art – and hence a constructively critical stance in the world. «It is important that you used the term formation and not education, for obvious reasons», they begin to tell me, once again demonstrating the important weight of words. «The question you pose is a complicated one, and the first answer is the fact that we have always evaded the opportunity to teach. Cinematic technique is intuitive. Children are born with a phone in their hand; they shoot videos, edit them, add music to them. It is clear that sometimes the aim and content of this works are ephemeral, but among thousands there will always be someone who aspires to say more, to explore more. To dive into errors, to vivisect them. Both writing and the formation of an aesthetic taste proceed by trial and error. It is vital that the hunger remains high, to cope with all those times when the outcome does not match our ambition. Only those who persist against all odds can escape the mediocrity of never really failing. And that, above all, is the essential condition for an artist. The artist must always face the abyss, and strive for solutions so as not to fall into it». I know how luminous their reasoning is. I know what it means to learn art independently simply because it makes you feel alive. And I know too how insidious the present can be, for my own formation was that of an obsessive grade-grubbing student, and as the mother of a young woman at university, I constantly struggle with myself not to fall back into that trap. I also see that, for one lecturer who cannot help but demand her the exact dimensions of the German scene in medieval theatre, there is another who, in asking the connection between music and technology, halted her and said yes well alright but I’d like to know what do you think. «It is a difficult moment for the new generations. A lot of things aren’t even experimented in fear of appearing embarrassing, whereas youth is the time in which we should live in embarrassment. It is the moment when all the embarrassment in the world belongs to us. Yet there is a tremendous fear of being cringe. Everything is cringe, but what still hasn’t been realised is that cringe is a foolish definition, used in even more idiotic contexts, proliferating in environments where trial is not contemplated. Or rather, not freely contemplated. To cast off all embarrassment and respect one’s own grace: that is the only advice we feel compelled to give – besides the simpler advice to cease procrastinating indefinitely. If you can make an error, do it now». 88 89 responsibility of art: the discomfort «Recently I have come to understand that films having such widespread, popular consensus are films that speak to no one, they seem not to belong to anyone at all, which is why everyone goes to see them: for they will not return home and reflect upon them. And to me that is deeply destabilising, for art, be it high or low, must be uncomfortable, it must give you a bit of an itch, or else you might as well go have a massage». – Mattia Carzaniga, Profondo D’Innocenzo, Rolling Stone, 2024 There is little more to say: the greatest responsibility of artists is to remain true to their vital value of being problematizers. In the presence of their works, or their thoughts, they must be able to challenge you, to force you to reflect on a chewed-up status quo, to take a stance that is honestly your own. That is what the Brothers do, claiming diversity as authenticity, without ever commodifying it into an Instagrammable brand or an artwashing tool – «Happy are those who are different / being different. / But woe to those who are different / being common», Sandro Penna wrote in 1938, prophetic of the current self-sabotage we do perpetrate with a sadistic, dysthanasia-like constancy, at the two-faced cry of Broadcast Yourself. Diversity magnified in their work like a kaleidoscope, both in terms of medium – direction, screenplay, photography, poetry, adverts, videoclips, or even the comic strip of the battered piglet Gino Pilotino, drawn at the age of six through which, as they say, they discovered the existence of the teeth of their father, who used to proudly crack up with laughter – and in terms of aesthetics. From the very mastery of framing since their debut work, Boys cry is composed of nervous tracking shots lit by the cold glare of neon. Bad tales is a hyper-contemporary fresco of sepia-toned memories featuring dysmorphic bodies, bellies and hair and Nazi-like cuts, against the divine grace of children. Latin America (2021) is a labyrinth of perfectly symmetrical tableaux to superimpose the order of a beauty canon upon the chaos of a deranged mind. The videoclip for Ghali’s track Niente panico (2024) is a close-up that explodes in your face, to teach you how to hold the gaze of the other, and Epilogue for Gucci (2020) brings the vivid saturation of surrealist elements into the composition of the most visionary contemporary photography. Dostoevskij, with his textured, raw, scratched 16 mm grain, seems like an expressionist piece translated into seriality (of the crime, as well as of the format), a gastroscopic journey examining unspeakable cavities through the grainy long take of a microtube camera. And then it happens that, while I am passionately listing the aforementioned successes, also from the critics’ point of view, Fabio and Damiano correct me to assume yet another responsibility, that of dissent: «First of all – and for the sake of our integrity to act regardless of consensus – we must add to your generous list the videoclip we shot in Los Angeles for Kanye West [TALKING / ONCE AGAIN, 2024, Editor’s Note]. There was everything to lose, and that was the crux of the matter, the reason why we immediately said: let’s do it. Even Kanye West has contributed to our imagery. Some of his albums are extraordinary. The bulimia of his ambition is praiseworthy, apart from our distance from some of his viewpoints emerged in recent years». A video through which they knew they could have provoked dissent even before they stepped behind the camera as an opportunity to denounce that, long before the artist, it is the art itself that must speak.
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