121 fighting the system in the name of a thought able to dress both habit and habits. «Climate revolution is punk, punk is alive! Same attitude but more developed, solid and I hope effective ideas in changing the Earth more than they have been in the past», Westwood wrote in her 2014 autobiography, actively fighting against the manufacturing and scheduling of fashion, the second most polluting industry after that of oil processing. Because anarchy, beyond being a political doctrine to be handled with extreme care and very careful dosage, is above all an attitude that, if possessed by an artistic spirit combined with a thoughtful mind, can fight for the right battles, knowing how to be deeply ethical. interlude ‘cause I wanna be anarchy This is the story of two groups of friends, all artists, all united by the same punk charge and the same existential parable. The first was formed in the New York scene of the early seventies, the stage of Andy Warhol's Silver Factory and Julian Beck's Living Theater: art as a contamination of languages. The group – including Laurie Anderson, Joan Jonas, Lucio Pozzi, Trisha Brown and, its beating heart, Gordon MattaClark (1943-1978) – decided to set up as a collective and therefore gave itself a programmatic name: Anarchitecture Group, crasis of anarchy + architecture. Photography, dance, sculpture, performance gathered around the actions of the anarchitect Matta-Clark, whose main action, as for the anarchy towards the system, was essentially one: that of rupture. He did it materially, identifying in the world buildings full of memory but destined for demolition, in the name of a post-war building speculation that boasted the alibi of modernization, but the real motive of the only economic income. An unscrupulous urban planning practice that, as happened with the eviscerations of Fascist Rome, razed diversity to the ground to build homologation: blocks in the suburbs that isolated the working class, terraced houses to happily segregate the middle class, palaces of power where work was hierarchized. Thus, on places one step away from definitive cancellation – once again sub-limen, on the verge of oblivion and sublime, whose sacrifice would have deliberately given way to nothing but the proliferation of anonymity – Matta-Clark, graduate in architecture, intervened with his building cuts, opening wise gashes into the cement to open symbolic gashes into the conscience. Matta-Clark's cuts, like those of Lucio Fontana on canvas and those of Vivienne Westwood on fabric, were anarchic searches for another space, for new points of view; but, opened on buildings with their own history and not on virgin canvases, they assumed a strong ethical value and a new dimension of political denunciation, light that breaks through unprecedented slits to shed light on the need for a new social paradigm, more open, more permeable, more inclusive. Matta-Clark, who built numerous shelters for the homeless. Matta-Clark, alongside the workers of Sesto San Giovanni, in 1975, during the occupation of an abandoned factory, which in a letter that became manifesto, Arc de Triomphe for Workers, proposed to them to «open breaches into the walls to communicate an idea of free passage». Matta-Clark, who dissected walls, removed floors or entire facades, drew ellipses of void to pay homage to stories nearing the end, anarchist architectures, anarchitectures for which the collective intervened by filming, photographing, dancing, aware that those ephemera – photographic or video documentation of those actions – were all that would have remained about that story. It is the same poignant and, at the same time, detonating feeling, like the last firework that is always the most spectacular, that comes over you when you listen to Epica Etica Etnica Pathos, the 1990 album of that glorious punk experience, registered Via Emilia, embodied by the CCCPs – Fedeli alla linea (trans. sticking to the line). In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, while the USSR was close to dissolving, Epica Etica Etnica Pathos is a concept album in four sections conscious of being the last, taking note of the decline of an evidently idealized model and that, due to this reason, decides to write a testament: a legacy that preserves the sentimental geography of the places, of ethics and aesthetics of the CCCPs, which for months were used to open their concerts with their hallucinated version of Mina's L’importante è finire (that is, What’s important is to cease). A creation compromised from the start, so, because aware of its end. A punk swansong that takes charge of its own transitory nature, but this does not prevent it from hitting hard, exactly as for the Matta-Clark’s cuts, to allow, a moment before leaving, the vision of an alternative. In the third section of the album, Etica, that alternative is given in Campestre (trans. rural), in the recovery of an intimate dimension, away from metropolitan delirium and consistent with a research proclaimed since their beginnings: sticking to the line – but there’s no line out here.
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