123 lack, a discard. The third landscape lies in that discard, whose protection is art, but first of all it is ethics. Between humble and sublime. Between vernacular and extraordinary. The third landscape is inappropriate and insubordinate, yet it holds true decorum. Between the art of getting by and Arte Povera, made up of rejects upgraded to art. Between the mixed pasta, put together with the remains of the other packs of pasta, and Edoardo's spaghetti with fujute (trans. escaped) clams, in which the expensive part is missing but the suggestion of it remains alive, so much so that it fells like those clams are in there. Between the ruined signs of the drugstore the shaving room the haberdashery the salt and tobaccos, and the stalls on the street corner with the old peasant women and the harvest of the day, with the old fishermen and the catch of the day (yes, I live in the South, triumph of the wild, of the unfinished as infinite, of the care of others in spite of everything, of the poetic potential. The South, in a certain way, in its barbaric and silent and ethically loving parts, where predators do not arrive, is the third landscape; but it is always worth reminding that each of us is south of someone). The third landscape is the Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples, a catacomb of forty thousand bones of lives cut off by the epidemics in 1656 and 1836, where the living have always come down, adopted and taken care of a skull, the capuzzella, in exchange for protection for their own life. The third landscape is Foucault's heterotopia, as an already existing but underestimated alternative system. The third landscape is Alberto Burri's Grande Cretto in Gibellina, an immense shroud of white cement lying on the rubble of the 1968 earthquake, preserving the subsistent network of streets unaltered. The third landscape, indeed, shines among the debris. The Pasolinian slums in Accattone (1961) and in Mamma Roma (1962), the barbaric suburbia in Ugly, dirty and bad (Ettore Scola, 1976) and in Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018), where humanity has no way out because no one cares about it and yet poetry is like couch grass, it takes root carelessly: «Humanism must become humanity or it’ll die» says a girl of the Rione Sanità in La paranza della Bellezza (Luca Rosini, 2019). The third landscape is what Clément asks to look at, to respect deeply in its being other, with which it is more than ever necessary to start an affectionate coexistence, a closeness, a commonality, for an ethics in life that, you see, fits perfectly with the ethics that vivifies art. Just as the third landscape is the territory that welcomes and embraces the elsewhere rejected diversity, so does art. Just as «Diversity is what leads us to approach the other with wonderment», writes Clément, so wonderment is what leads us to approach art. Art, my friends, is the other. Art, in its deepest ethical function, is the triumph of the third landscape. ghost track grand finale The fullness of life comes above all through moments capable of taking your breath away, with all respect for those with normal pulsations, because those moments are able of changing you, of making you grow, of making you better. The fullness of art comes above all through works capable of taking your breath away, with all respect for comforting or winking chores, because those works are able of changing you, of making you grow, of making you better. Everything that is capable of changing you, of making you grow, of making you better, is ethics. Up to you to find the Grand Finale of this syllogism.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUzNDc=