136 137 And finally, it happens. It happens that last September, La Grazia by Paolo Sorrentino premieres in Venice: a cinematic President of the Italian Republic wrestles with the dilemma of granting clemency (whose equivalent word in Italian is grazia, the grace) to a confessed murderer who ended, in her sleep, the life of his beloved partner, terminally ill for years. And it happens again that, at the end of last year – at the Quirinale, not within a fictional script – Sergio Mattarella signs the decree of clemency for Franco Cioni, confessed murderer who in 2021 ended, in her sleep, the life of his beloved partner, terminally ill for years, thus opening an institutional debate on a necessary issue: end-of-life, the right to therapeutic self-determination. In that narrow margin between a projected image and an official signature, between a shared alternative and a sovereign decision, art and culture reveal their nature as invisible infrastructures of rights. Not representation, but prefiguration. It is through them that grace, as care for life, begins to take shape as shared thought. And once a thought is shared, it demands incarnation. And once a thought is shared, sooner or later it will be flesh. Ultimately, the artistic gesture of Eva & Franco Mattes, straddling the cutie the détournement and the shock, is entirely contained in their visionary, hyper-realistic, ferociously sarcastic exposure of the processes underpinning the digital culture of sharing: neither gift nor empathy, but exposure and negotiation, in a system that invites us to share everything without ever telling us at what cost – as the Netflix docuseries The Social Dilemma warned: «If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.» Needless to say, I reached Eva & Franco online – as the web is after all a powerful tool, if one knows how to use it – and asked them whether the voluntary act of making themselves completely visible, and therefore infinitely shareable and modifiable, aimed to trigger the ultimate crash of one of art’s bastions, namely authorship as exclusivity: «We have always viewed the myth of the solitary genius, the isolated inspired artist, with suspicion: suffice it to study any work in depth, to discover the collective genesis of every idea, image, or technique. Our works emerge from phenomena that themselves arise online, often anonymously – memes, computer viruses, reaction videos. We try to pause these flows for a while, observe them closely, extract something, and then put them back into circulation: a two-legged cat, a person pretending to be an algorithm, a mysterious video that has been destroyed.» And they reflect, caustically: «It is interesting to observe how a work disperses across systems of distribution – online, on phones, in cinemas, in magazines – once it is released, and then watched stripped duplicated pirated quoted and misquoted misread recycled, until its original context collapses and authorship is definitely gone. Lately, when we stumble upon pirated versions of our own works, we absorb them back into the work itself, producing editions that are simultaneously authentic yet derivative. At that point, sharing is no longer a secondary effect: it has turned into the work itself? To share then means accepting not to be at the center anymore. As Nietzsche spat it out: After all, what do I matter?». This is why this text does not close, because sharing keeps its arms permanently open. And it does not necessarily pacify, because sharing is also fertile ground for conflict. The world burns as rights are hollowed out: public squares sterilised by nostalgic truncheons, strips of land weaponised into genocidal pretexts, dissent received the way background noise is received, maybe because history is unambiguous on one point: rights entered constitutions only after passing through alliances of bodies, through assemblies, through streets, through communities that recognised themselves long before being recognised. Sharing comes before the law. It prepares it, it rehearses it. It pressures it into existence. It lives in celebration, in embrace and in riot. It is a practice that trains the gaze to think itself from within, never from above. It is an act of freedom not radical, but radicant. It carries a queer ontology: eccentric and off-centre, porous, experimental, excessive, undisciplined – like the fluid, prismatic identity of contemporary art itself. And like sharing, art too knows how to alternate voices, interlace plans, master the glitch, make complexity inhabitable, and an alternative imaginable. «¡Seguimos aquí!» – Bad Bunny, Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, 2026
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