We have been taught to recognise sharing in the crowd. In swarming squares, in stadiums, in marches, in compact blocks that saturate the visual field until the horizon itself vanishes. We have been taught that whenever bodies gather, a community is born; that proximity is a form of belonging; that simultaneity already means relation. Yet the photographs of Masses, the project by Angelo Del Negro that runs through this issue of Ossigeno like a counter-chant, crack this certainty. Upon closer inspection, where we believe we see a whole, we discover a sum. Where we imagine a fabric, atoms scatter. Where we think we recognise a collective gesture, we find ourselves before a multitude of solos. Spaces saturated with bodies, that graze without ever touching. Public places as fields of tension, crossed by lines of flight that separate rather than unite, propagandising sharing while, upon closer inspection, speaking of division. These are images that do not photograph sharing: they interrogate it. Because those masses are never truly one. Because within those masses, sharing is suspended. Within the folds of this suspension, Masses becomes the perfect backdrop for this issue of Ossigeno – since images have always been the privileged locus of collective storytelling, yet in the contemporary age, we live immersed in uninterrupted visual flows. Through images, masses become audience, the audience becomes traffic, traffic becomes value to be monetised. In this silent transition, something is lost: the time required for a gaze to become relation, for a presence to turn into listening, for a space to truly call itself common. As these pages unfold, the tableaux of Masses freeze simultaneity – the surface of sharing; yet the essays recount the bond, the quintessence of sharing. Rivers of masked, alienated, out-of-focus bodies, their current dispersing into a cluster of individual trajectories – in the square, in fenced queues, at the market and on the market – alongside the river evoked by Andreas Weber, that primordial flow that makes of all lives a single fluid body. An x beach, oversaturated with color, carousels and bodies separating concrete from ocean to sell entertainment at all costs – and a paradigm, the Nature Positive one, kneading those colors with the responsibility of an edutainment shared between education, institutions, and the environment. Aerial shots, colder chromatic scales, bodies reduced to dots in almost entomological compositions – and an essay, by William Charles, on the limits of voluntarism, for without active support, the mass is nothing but a swarm. And when the stadium contains the choreography of automatic raised arms, and when those arms become prostheses for a rise of smartphones turning gazes into a screen, Ventura reminds us that a gesture is not enough, least of all the automatic gesture of sharing, to bring true sharing into being. Community must be made, recognising each other not merely because we occupy the same space, but inasmuch as we are together willing to build a common one. Perhaps this is the reason why Masses does not accompany this issue on sharing as a simple sequence to be consumed, but as a threshold to be crossed, so that the view may finally be free and clear. Look, but then know how to read, for true sharing begins when the gaze becomes care. You need to cross the surface, taking the proper time which is not the reel one, cherishing the courage and the will to question what is sold to us as given, knowing how to interpret. It is within the voices that interrogate sharing from different perspectives – philosophy, economics, pedagogy, science, technology, and contemporary art – that what in Masses appears divided, returns to thinking of itself as common. Looking is not enough, if we are to speak of sharing. Upon closer inspection, grant yourself the time to read. 159 158 Redemption, perhaps, may be found by those who have the patience to observe these moments frozen in time carefully — in a detail, a movement, a face that moves against the current, something that stands out amid these human masses. – Angelo Del Negro, excerpt from Masses' synopsis, 2022 Upon closer inspection. Masses by Angelo Del Negro
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