Pistoletto is one of the most renowned Italian and European contemporary artists. His artistic work emerged in the “arte povera” environment, but his work didn’t remain restricted to the standardized possibilities and resources of this tendency; he also developed his art in the fields of performance. There are two texts that summarize his ideas about art and its potential: The Last Famous Word (a companion to the birth of conceptual art) and Omnitheism and Democracy. The latter condenses the vision developed by CITTADELLARTE-Fondazione Pistoletto, that carries out its activities starting from the artist’s initiative since 1998.
In its origins, the institution worked as a laboratory of ideas in which the artists were an integrating part of the whole: their vocation to question the autonomy of art, to give it back to society, to try to implement its potential –its principles of creativity, freedom, (re)generation- as valid elements to organize a vital praxis that emancipates and dignifies man, enabled the inclusion of specialists from different sectors of the social tissue. They went forward gradually to a model where art forces intertwine and modulate in combination with a profound ethical and political commitment, directed to a responsible transformation of society in which we all must play a significant role and guided by principles of sustainability.
To confine the totality of life placing art in the middle of such a transformation was the passion of the most radical avant-garde tendencies of the 20th century. But notions such as inclusivity, the desacralization of art, participation and the cultural activation tinge, as coordinates of contemporary art, this organization’s perspectives of action. That’s why, an extended concept of “art” that thinks of itself as generator of new cultural dynamics beyond a mere artistic item and certain aesthetic criteria; a widened notion about “politics” that tends to get rid of its professionalism as an activity and takes a glance to “politics-related matters” as the intersubjective space, where every human being is a potential party; the concept of “activation” and its link to the “construction of situations” defined by the Situationist International, with a twist that leans towards the disassembling of leaderships and programmatic orientations and favors horizontal construction and incubation (focused on actions like coordinating, contributing, and donating), and an approach to “alternativity” that doesn’t imply a detachment from institutions but the collective invitation to rethink programs, methods for action and ranges of action, considering the specific demands of the spaces that are expected to intervene, would be the essential foundations of the projects that are being created and promoted.
On the other hand, the “Rebirth” or “Renaissance” project is inspired in the previous notions and in the idea of a “Third Paradise”, a way through which Pistoletto synthesizes in his book Omnitheism and Democracy the journey of humankind, past and future: from a primary state in a natural-earthly paradise to an artificial paradise, emerged and generalized in the Modern Era, that has led to the extraordinary achievements of science and technology, but, at the price of an alarming process of planetary deterioration. The Third Paradise would be – as Pistoletto claims- a process that, starting from art, tries to mobilize the mental and practical energies of every individual and is aiming to a transformation concerning all aspects of human life, not the prophesy of “a future impregnated with metaphysic hopes(…)”. It would consist of the synthesis of antagonistic figures from the principle of trinamics, which, in general, expresses the combination of two units that originate a third absolutely new unit. Broadly speaking, it´s about a reformulation of dialectics, but in a way in which the confronted elements will not end up diluted, but reconciliated in the midst of their opposition, mediated. The symbol of the project is the triple circle: the infinite sign with a central ellipse, born from the interaction of the circles in their tips. Through this, the image of a new balance and a different way to understand creativity reaches a characteristic visualization.
A year ago “Rebirth” made its first appearance in Cuba. An action in the Almendares river mouth, where the fishermen of that zone, aboard their boats, making the triple circle on the sea, marked the first step of this venture. The 12th Biennial of Visual Arts of Havana, only a few months later, reaffirmed the bonds between Pistoletto and Cuba through the celebration of a new action, this time at the Cathedral Square. Last month, the event “Rebirth. Geographies of Transformation”, in which scientific, artistic and cultural institutions along with different sectors of the civil society, certified the Cuban experience of a “Rebirth” network, coordinated and activated by the embassy of the project in Cuba, whose function responds to the above-mentioned ideas and projects itself towards the dismantling of hierarchies and construction of horizontality: the “Rebirth” initiative, its concepts, its symbol, are not a property or an authorial monopoly of Pistoletto and his foundation, but a sort of platform that with its support at a creativity level can fuse and multiply ideas. Structuring in embassies is intended to break traditional work schemes and pyramidal structures regarding programmatic centralization and financing. Thus, reinvention concerning these matters is a constant in its activist praxis.
The last few days have witnessed multiple events to celebrate the International Day of Rebirth. Yesterday, December 17, one year since the first appearance of the “Third Paradise” symbol in Cuba, students and professors from the University of Havana’s Faculty of Arts and Letters, following an explanatory workshop about the spirit of the “Rebirth” project, drew with their bodies, at the mythical steps of the main venue of this institution, the symbol of renaissance. The validity of this performance didn’t only have a commemorative reason, but meant also the expansion of the “Rebirth” network thanks to the integration of new members to the ensemble of ideas and experiences linked to a global project. This way, Rebirth´s Cuban chapter was reinvented. It was a new birth, a miracle, because, as Hannah Arendt said:
Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a "miracle" that is, something which could not be expected. If it is true that action and beginning are essentially the same, it follows that a capacity for performing miracles must likewise be within the range of human faculties (...) Hence it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect "miracles"(…) And the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear; for it is disaster, not salvation, which always happens automatically and therefore always must appear to be irresistible.
December 18, 2015
Erick González León
(Rebirth Embassy, Havana, Cuba)
Translation by Lauren García Campello