Texts
LOVE DIFFERENCE SEEN BY...
Visions, reflections and future perspectives for
the Artistic Movement for an InterMediterranean Politic
METALOGO | OF HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
“Daughter: Daddy, can we change the world?
Father: We live in an environment that’s constantly changing.
D: Yes, ok... But can we have an effect on what’s happening around
us through our own actions?
F: I suppose so... remember when we talked about how the beat of a butterfly’s
wing can cause a hurricane in another part of the world?
D: But I don’t understand, I was asking you something else. We’re
not talking about how every little action can have a huge effect, but simply
how can we make the world we live in better.
F: Wait a second, tell me something first. Now you’re saying ‘better,
not ‘change’, but who decides what’s better?
D: Well... we do... me and you, society. People that want to change, I suppose.
Don’t confuse me...
F: But what me and you think is better for us, today, is that final?
D: I don’t think so, tomorrow we’ll have new problems and new
solutions. That’s why I want to understand what we can do today. But
how?
F: We have to agree.
D: But who?
F: The people who want to change. Before, you said that we are the agents
of change. So it’s necessary that we agree not only about our intention
to change, but also on how to accomplish it. Only then can we act, each
according to their ability and capacity.
D: That’s too abstract, I don’t understand. You, daddy, are
you doing something to change the world?
F: Listen. Every day I work to encourage dialogue between people by involving
them in creative things.
D: What do you mean?
F: My colleagues and I create moments in which people work together creatively,
getting to know each other and getting to know themselves a little better.
D: What’s that got to do with what we’re talking about? I don’t
understand: you talk about knowing ourselves better along with other single
people. How can that change the world?
F: Each of us grows in relation to a context. I would be different if I
hadn’t met mommy. And you would have grown up different if you hadn’t
met your friends. Understanding yourself better also means knowing others
better, and the relations they have with us. And if you want to make the
world better, it’s from there that you have to start out.
D: Maybe you’re right. So that means, if my friends knew themselves
better, things would get better between us, right?
F: Could be.
D: And creativity? Before you said you worked with creativity...
F: Yes, we research and study creative processes for the common good.
D: What do you mean?
F: Creativity is the capacity to invent and a fundamental resource for projects.
Anyone who uses their creativity can design new things working with others.
Isn’t that the answer to what you asked me in the first place?
D: Hmm.
F: Through our work we’ve found lots of people in the world who use
art and creativity primarily to create occasions to meet and talk, communicate
and do things together to find new solutions to shared needs.
D: And what do you do?
F: We make it possible for these people to meet so they can get to know
each other and share and compare their experiences. We also tell everyone
who doesn’t know them what they do. We show how to use creativity
to create innovative environments for relationships through seminars, workshops
and even new things like gastronomic workshops about dialogue between different
cultures.
D: What’s gastronomy got to do with it?
F: Gastronomy is like music, don’t you think? It’s made up of
cultural mixtures. Every dish is a product of relationships between cultures.
D: .... and then everyone loves eating. Everyone agrees about good food.
And dialogue always starts around food.
F: Precisely.
D: But they way you put it seems like there’s some kind of method,
a practice for working with people through creativity. But how can it work?
They’re individuals, each one different to the other, with completely
different habits and customs. You can’t think that there’s a
method for relating with each of them. Even less a single way of involving
people in shared actions.
F: Good point. But what you’re saying isn’t a limit, it’s
a resource. Understanding that we’re dealing with so many individuals
linked by a complex relational bond is the first step toward fielding a
great capacity to listen, to appreciate the skills and resources of a community.
D: So, more than a method, you’re talking about a way of thinking
and developing projects with others, always within specific situations,
generated each time by different needs.
F: ...and by different desires.
D: Desires?
F: Yes, dreams, desires.
D: Is that why the things written in the following pages look more like
scribbled notes than the agenda of a Parliament?
F: I reckon so. A good listener is an explorer of possible worlds. Creating
change means exploring new worlds, opening dialogue with others, giving
space to individual expression in the collective.
D: But, daddy, why didn’t you say that in the first place? That I
would have understood straight away.
F: Yes, I believe you would have. Anyway, now it’s time for bed.
D: Daddy, why are the grown-ups making war in Gaza, instead of just pretending
like children do?
F: No... bedtime. That’s enough. We can talk some other time about
Gaza.
by Filippo Fabbrica, Love Difference project manager, part of the
upcoming publication about the Mediterranean Cultural Parliament, curated
by Apollonia European Art Exchanges.
“With his extraordinary energy and attentiveness to the present day,
Michelangelo Pistoletto continues to churn out ideas, and work with the
younger generations. This is how the Love Difference experience came into
being recently, which involves me directly along with him and many others.
When Michelangelo Pistoletto asked me to take part in setting up Love Difference,
a creative and thought-based movement for triggering political commitment
in art, it struck me immediately that he had hit on something that the art
system needed. Art, as the production of artistic objects, is no longer
sufficient today while, instead, the need to leave preconceived judgments
on art behind and create new ways for being creative has become unavoidable.
Creativity can take up spaces that up to now were foreign to it or which
had never been related to it. It can be used differently and I’m thinking
of the system of economic production, the nearest activity to material reality.
Love Difference is exploring this terrain in order to bring about constant
change to creative thought, and set it in line with its time”.
by Chiara Bertola, curator of the Querini Stampalia Foundation
of Venice, in "Michelangelo Pistoletto. La realtà come dimensione
aperta, attiva e mai immobilizzante", Edizione Il Ponte, Firenze, 2003
“Art is a massage of the atrophied muscle of collective sensibility.
Collective sensibility, appeased by television and computers is massaged
by a wake-up system which is art; it is strengthened to becoming a collective
muscle that doesn’t make war but is nurtured by the co-existence of
differences”.
by Achille Bonito Oliva, art critic, From the speech at the "Art,
Culture, Knowledge and Democracy" round table event during the 51st
Venice Biennial on the Island of San Servolo, Venice, 8 - 9 June 2005
“Love difference is an art project that creates a threshold for entry
into real, working with different states and nations, observing the differences,
considering the multiplicity and diversity as an absolutely essential form
of wealth. In Love Difference Pistoletto brings together references to the
work of a lifetime. The mirror becomes table, a table that takes the form
of the Mediterranean Sea, which reflects the people coming from different
experience that sit around it to talk and exchange ideas. The work opens
in an exponential manner and involves individuals who are no longer audience
but active part in the definition of the project. So this process that started
with the mirrored works of the Sixties has much broader horizons now, and
art, - Love Differencebrunches into projects which measure against a globalized
world, and with an order of problems, stimuli, contradictions, challenges
and differences, which have never been seen before.
We are at a new passage. Art is the treshold for crossing it.”
by Cloe Piccoli, Indipendent art critic and curator in "Progetto
Arte–Journal 9", Fondazione Pistoletto Onlus editore, Torino,
2005
Starting out from the idea of the sea that bears the name Mediterranean
we extend the concept of Love Difference to planetary level broadeningour
vision to other Mediterranean Seas of the world. Each of these gathers historical
and contemporary realities of different cultures around its shores which
are related to different countries.The name mediterranean has a meaning
common to all seas surrounded by land, as opposed to oceans and expanses
of water without defined perimeters.”
by Michelangelo Pistoletto, in "Progetto Arte–Journal
9", Fondazione Pistoletto Onlus editore, Torino, 2005
“We are convinced that the issue of the differences in Mediterranean
cultures should be tackled first and foremost on a cultural level. The crux
of the problem is aesthetic-ethical, namely of the forms that express, determine
and set off moral processes. This is a responsibility to be shouldered first
and foremost by intellectuals who instead of merely following, noting, discussing
and commenting should be in the front line in playing a significant direct
role in changing tendencies, beginning to investigate and propose, organize
and set up new mental forms. The issue now pressing upon us is: ‘Uniformity
or difference? – predomination of the global economic system, or multiplicity
of social forms, ideas, cultures, methods and individualities?”.
by Michelangelo Pistoletto, in "Osservatorio Intermediterraneo",
a publication distributed in 2001 for Arte al Centro di una trasformazione
sociale responsabile, Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella
“People have been thinking about the Mediterranean for some fifty
years, analysing and turning issues and problems inside out.
If artists want to get involved, either they study a lot and only then do
something or otherwise they look like raw amateurs only out for cheap thrills
and applause. Good intentions are one of art’s biggest perils today,
and I feel it is no coincidence that Baj and Virilio were the first to realise
it. I feel that Love Difference could be an interesting container as long
as its aim is not to force commitment as an artistic form but, instead,
sets off directly to do works whose reading makes some sense and encourages
the provocation of reality. I’m tired of seeing architects and artists
concentrating on the Israeli wall or on immigration without there being
any real impact on resolving the problems. Furthermore, I think it’s
a scandal when someone works with handicapped children to make art. The
worst is having salvaged the category of art as something intrinsically
positive. Artists are in danger of replacing boy scouts or charitable ladies
with the same hypocrisy and nil impact on reality.“
“The Mediterranean is not a place for
putting recipes into practice. It is first and foremost a very complicated
and violent place. Artists could use their sensitivity to tackle these issues,
but in order to understand them or seek to understand them. One example
for me comes from Pierre Huygues who has extensively studied illicit practices
in the south of Italy as a key for understanding what dreams and hopes people
have when they make a home. I repeat, my viewpoint is wholly external. I
am an anthropologist, I do fieldwork and research and I know the Mediterranean
well enough to be aware that art is very often used for hiding essential
lacunae.
I grew up in Gibellina in Sicily and I know what a scandal art is there.
Having said that, I’ll stop here and leave those really involved to
pardon my highly primitive reaction.”
by Franco La Cecla, anthropologist, in comments delivered to the
2nd Love Difference Members' Meeting
Download
the text "Of how to change the world" in PDF format
Download
the texts "Love Difference seen by..." in PDF format
