PERFORMANCE
video documentation of the performative action carried out with residents and commercial activities of Via del Pratello in Bologna.
Duration 1'
For the fiftieth anniversary of the Coup d’état which took place in Chile on 11 September 1973, Francesco Di Tillo proposes <In distinct latitudes> a transmission and multiple coding of the message “We were so happy that we wanted everyone to be happy”. These words, pronounced by the wife of one of Allende’s companions eliminated by the Pinochet regime, return as natural language, emitted with the voice as it was then, but are also expressed in intermittent signals, scanned according to Morse coding, which in turn are transposed into a rhythmic sequence of ‘dit-dah’.
The superposition of acoustic pulsations (. .-. .- …- .- — —) and the phonetic pattern (dit dit-dah-dit dit-dah dit-dit-dit-dah dit-dah dah- dah dah-dah-dah) informs a composition similar to a Dada poem; except that the pauses between the parts of speech and the recurrences that can be heard by listening, suggest the presence of meaning and the mere appearance of nonsense.
Codification, in the work of Francesco Di Tillo, refers to the cultural strategies identified to avoid censorship in contexts of limited possibility of expression. A historical case dates back to the Information exhibition, held in 1970 at MoMA, when the institution, unable to speak openly about the war in Vietnam, hung four banners with the word PEACE (converted into Morse) on the façade of the museum. But <In distinct latitudes> wants to overcome the hermeticism of the code, simultaneously offering it not the solution, but a tool for its decoding. Interpreting the short and long sounds of Morse as a succession of ‘dit’ and ‘dah’ is in fact a method used to encourage the learning and decryption of this language. As if to say that the ideal of shared happiness, which echoes in the words of the original message, coming from Chile which experienced, and saw utopia collapse, flows beneath things and the possibility of placing it depends on our posture in place and make it real.
«Unimaginable, unthinkable, unspeakable» is the dismay of the end of the utopia consummated within the zeroing violence of Chilean repression; «unimaginable» is, in the artist’s words, «what we need to build from scratch, to imagine within ourselves, within this historical moment: a radically new future».
text by Tatiana Basso for the performative action created in Bologna for the Oltre il Blu project, curated by Tatiana Basso and Serendippo.
In collaboration with the Amanecer and Pratello R’esiste association.
