102 day 7 Making the invisible visible, a case history: invisibility of the subject Pius XIII - Ok, so: who is the most important author of the last twenty years? Careful now, not the best, virtuosity is for the arrogant… The most important, the author who has sparked so much morbid curiosity that he became the most important? Sofia Dubois - I wouldn’t know. I’d say Philip Roth. Pius XIII - No, Salinger. The most important film director? Sofia Dubois - Spielberg? Pius XIII - No, Kubrick. Contemporary artist? Sofia Dubois - Jeff Koons... Marina Abramović? Pius XIII - Banksy. Electronic music group? Sofia Dubois - I don’t know the first thing about electronic music! Pius XIII - And you say Harvard is a good university... Anyway, Daft Punk. The best Italian female vocalist? Sofia Dubois - Mina. Pius XIII - Very good! Now do you know what it is, what the invisible red thread is that connects them all, all these most important figures in their respective fields? None of them let themselves be seen. None of them let themselves be photographed. (The Young Pope, directed by Paolo Sorrentino, ep. 02-10, 2016) Maybe it is the practical result of a willingness to focus on the action, rather than on the agent. More simply, a desire to safeguard one's own private. It could be an obliged act to carry out an activity, in different levels of legality, that whatever the reason must be faceless. Maybe it is an act of supreme vanity, or a strategy decided on a theoretical level to make people talk about them, deliberately having the diametrically opposite effect to what usually produces the fact of being invisible. Due to bet or narcissism, to necessity or provocation, to reaction, concertation or protection, acting on subtraction – first and foremost of the identity, strengthening the work and the stolen identity itself, morbid as we are. Fact is that the invisibility of the subject, for those who have chosen or suffered it, has become a very powerful sounding board of their work, in the mockingly anachronistic and ideally perfect glory of anonymity, because nothing more than invisibility amplifies and fosters imagination, fuelling the narrative of an urban legend. Those that I report below, in addition to the famous invisible ones declaimed by the beautiful and beautifully cynical Young Pope by Paolo Sorrentino, are but a shortlist of faceless names accompanied, where present, by the title of one of their works. For anyone, like me, who wants to break the showcase, and choose what kind of invisibility to play.
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