Italy, I’d say, and among the greatest in the world, thus necessarily inside the system – I can figure that’s a bit tricky to belong to it, and not coincide with its dictates. What I then receive is not an answer, it’s a manifesto: «For us art is not merely a product or a form of entertainment, but an act of resistance, of imagination and sometimes even of subversion. In this context, art becomes a space in which it is possible to think the impossible, a place where the dream becomes social, political and civil practice5.» «Our history as gallerists has always been about imagining together, creating a shared vision able to transcend the simple commercial act. This is our way of confronting the system: not as sellers, but as agents of transformation, who see in art the opportunity to activate processes of change. We do this together with the artists we work with and believe in, who come from all parts of the world: Europe, Asia, India, Africa, Latin America. Our ability to dream has, essentially, never changed: we look to the future without forgetting the past. Our dreaming today, perhaps, is simply more aware, but we do not stop imagining, together with others, new possible worlds.» Explicit: Eva & Franco Mattes, Life Sharing – or the glitch of sharing So far we have traced, through conversations with two luminous cases such as Nicolas Bourriaud and the founders of Galleria Continua, how sharing in art can turn into a sound and complex bearer of a hope for salvation; yet in closing, we cannot ignore the fact that today sharing, beyond Maria Lai’s blue thread, flows mostly not through a textile fibre, but through an optical one. Share as a diktat, catapulted straight into a dystopian script which is our present. Let us confront the matter: what happens when sharing is no longer physical but digital, from bodies to data, from care to virus? The answer comes once again from art, from Eva & Franco Mattes (Brescia, 1976, living and working between Brescia and New York), among the most revolutionary and lucid voices in post-internet art. Their research, born in the realms of Net Art and hacking in the 1990s, explores the hijacking, distortion, and wear of the concept of sharing made by the web. If in Paolo Sorrentino’s latest masterpiece, La Grazia, Whose are our days? is the recurrent leitmotiv, Eva & Franco Mattes seem to translate the dilemma in Whose are our acts of sharing?: their work is indeed based on a profound investigation of data-sharing practices, identity in the digital era, and the role of the public as co-author, observer, victim, and accomplice. Works such as Life Sharing (2000–2003), in which they opened the entirety of their hard drive to the global audience in real time as if it were a flayed body, overturn the very idea of privacy and authorship, allowing potentially infinite modification of their oeuvre; in the project No Fun (2010) they broadcast a staged suicide on Chatroulette, documenting users’ reactions and showing how digital, or cable-mediated, sharing does not necessarily generate empathy, but often a dehumanising apathy – as is always the case with voluntary or tragically involuntary overexposure (cf. Ukraine, cf. Palestine, cf. anywhere tragedy is staged). The Mattes employ viral and seemingly innocuous memes, such as hyper-inflated kitten images (Cursed Cat in 2025, Half Cat in 2020, among others), to raise awareness of the control and propaganda mechanisms inherent in viral imagery6. In works like The Bots (2020), For Internet Use Only (2021), and What Has Been Seen (2022), Eva & Franco Mattes shine a spotlight on the work carried out by content moderators, tasked with filtering horror to make platforms, so to speak, inhabitable: a new alienating assembly line between those who produce, those who cleanse, and those who consume, interrogating contemporary forms of invisible labour. 133 5Now, someone who’s all business might shrug it off as mere coincidence, yet on December 16, 2014, dozens of fishing boats – helmed by Michelangelo Pistoletto and backed by Galleria Continua – converged in the waters off Havana to form the symbol of the Third Paradise. The very next day, Obama called Fidel Castro to discuss resuming diplomatic ties. The story unfolded differently, of course, but that is another matter, one that, alas, has nothing to do with art. 6Allow me a digression, circling back to the Mattes’ work and the trap of digital sharing: those viral videos of Gaza as a resort, and of the start of the bombing in Iran to the tune of the Macarena, shared by Donald Trump, beyond their grotesque Corleonesque mobboss aesthetics, are anything except sharing. They are colonialist pornography in HD, I mean that with all due respect to pornography. Sharing demands first and foremost the recognition of the Other, but there, the already-martyred Other is humiliated all over again, erased, annihilated. What remains is only power, staring at itself in the mirror of its own crude and crass impunity. I refuse to call that act sharing, not least from a semantic point of view, because that is nothing but filth. Perhaps it’s time to question how long the dual alibi of «Well but that’s a democracy» can still hold up. And perhaps, rather than blathering on about sharing, the point is to save it from its rape. «It is challenging conventions, opening venues and spaces of artistic projectuality where no one would have ever thought, from China to Cuba, from the French countryside to Brazil. It is the courage to keep foolhardiness alive and, if necessary, to jump without a parachute, continuing to believe, always and in any case, in the transformative capacity of art, going beyond economic and market logics. For thirty-five years we have committed ourselves to building living experiences, for us, for the artists we work with and for the people we meet. We live risk not only as something to be faced, but as an energy that pushes us to continually question what it means to share today, how art can still become encounter. This is the risk that, perhaps, still allows art to maintain a political and social function: that of making the public not a passive consumer, but a travelling companion in the exploration of new horizons, of new possibilities.» After all, divergence of opinion is something Mario, Lorenzo and Maurizio know well, starting from their own different opinions, their own different souls. In The Ability to Dream they are described like this by the splendid person closest to them, Silvia Pichini, Continua’s head of communication: «Lorenzo is a person with enormous energy. He is the one who sees the glass not half full, but rather overflowing; being very much a perfectionist, he finds it hard to delegate. Mario is a dreamer, an idealist, a poet at heart, and this sometimes makes him impractical – perhaps, that is the flip side of the coin. Maurizio is the tipping point: he always manages to soften tones and find the trait d’union to move the work forward, but at times he has spikes of daredevilry and irrationality you would never expect.» There is no rhetoric of togetherness, no mythology of harmony; instead, there is a daily practice of reciprocal confrontation. Continua’s guidance looks more like a neural network than a corporate direction, a synaptic circuit activated by consonances, growing through dissonances, reconfiguring itself through intermittences, feedback and proximity, in continuous upgrade. Like a circuit, and through fertile short-circuits, every individual choice carries the imprint of the other two: in friction, energy; in fusion, sustainability. «To us, Galleria Continua means not only a physical space – they tell me – but a concept that extends through time and relationships, where art becomes a form of reciprocal exchange and each person is active in building a dialogue. Friction is the crucial point that feeds energy: it is a movement in constant flux, continuously fuelled by differences, contradictions and tensions between people and ideas. That is what happens between us: we are three different individuals, with visions and thoughts often divergent, and it is precisely the fusion you refer to that has allowed us to find a balance, enabling us to grow together and to create our identity. What feeds us reciprocally is the ability to put ourselves continually into question, to put into play ideas, energies, proposals born of confrontation that create fertile ground for growth. In this process, each of us is both donor and receiver. And the beauty lies precisely in interaction and in inexhaustible mutual enrichment.» Indeed, The Ability to Dream doesn’t feel like a backward-looking recollection, but rather a forward-facing reboot. Sharing, for Mario Lorenzo and Maurizio, has never meant dividing up, but rather generating. Putting visions into circulation as an act of poetic insurrection, as a political gesture, almost as a form of civil disobedience, because, as Bifo says, only those who dream can survive capitalist realism: «If you think of an art gallery, you might imagine a shop window of merchants there to sell objects, but that is not the main score of their music,» Pascale Marthine Tayou says in The Ability to Dream. «You always have the impression that at Galleria Continua they break codes, inventing new ways of doing things. I am not an artist. They are not gallerists. We are together in denying a systematic method, and here is what makes encounter possible.» Beyond rhetoric, the dream against the system. This passage interests me particularly, because as major gallerists – without fear of contradiction the greatest in 132
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