Prede e predatori, il bipede non riesce a uscire dallo schema. Di tutte le zone di confine e di conflitto che ho visitato non realizzavo che l’Europa diventava la più ovvia. Il cervello fa magie per proteggerti dalla realtà. Sorprese per tutti a Bornato, fuori stagione
For the next few months I’ll be Visiting Professor at @nyuniversity where I’ll teach the course THE MENTAL STATE: multidisciplinary approach for artistic restitution - landscape analysis and narrative techniques. Thanks @casaitaliananyu and @spqrnyc for rolling the dice
Un estratto dall’articolo “I luoghi” di @_daniele_menin corredato dal progetto fotografico “Padania Classics” di @filippominelli .
Direttamente dal Vol. 01 di Panzoo Magp✨
Puoi leggerlo online sul nostro sito (link in bio). Le copie cartacee sono consultabili gratuitamente nei luoghi dellla fotografia a Roma. Segui i nostri canali per rimanere aggiornato! 🔗🧡
#panzoo
Identitarian symbols hide larger histories and uniqueness is more than nuanced: take Italy as an example. Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ isn’t a copy but it was widely inspired by the journey to the circles of hell of the prophet Muhammad, narrated in ‘Kitāb al Mi’rāj’ by al-Qushayri (‘Libro della Scala’ in Italian) in Al Andalus, when southern Spain and Portugal were Arab lands. The ‘Lioness of Venice’, one of the most powerful Italian symbols, turned out to be a Chinese sculpture from the Yangtze River brought back (it didn’t require a genius to notice the features but it’s now carbon proof certified). The intellectual foundation of the High Middle Ages and Renaissance, including the work of Thomas Aquinas, was made possible by the preservation and commentary of Aristotle’s texts by Islamic scholars like Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd). These texts entered Italy via translation centers in Sicily and again Toledo, al Andalus. The standard visual formula of the enthroned Virgin holding the Christ Child was directly adapted from Byzantine Hodegetria orthodox icons. These arrived in Italy via trade, diplomacy, and loot after the fall of Constantinople. The Pope’s triple-crowned headdress (Thiara) evolved from the Phrygian cap (a symbol of freed slaves in the Roman world) but merged with royal diadem styles from Persia. The brains of Depero and Balla exploded into Futurism only after Serge Diaghilev’s ‘Russian Ballets’ landed in Paris, as much as Italo Calvino’s ‘Fiabe Italiane’ was methodologically inspired by Vladimir Propp’s Russian folklore. Rossellini and Visconti broke with Hollywood’s conventions to create Neorealism only thanks to Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage.
This doesn’t mean that Italian heritage is fake like the news, but on the contrary that the Italian ability to bond with Eurasia is what made it a cultural icon for centuries: that’s the true heritage. I took these photos in Batumi, Georgia while thinking of ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ - identity is a construct, symbols are mirrors, everything is essential, nothing is important. Globalization is dead, is it time to pave the path to new cultural Silk Roads and honor the past ones?
Italo Calvino in his book ‘Le città invisibili’ narrates cities as described by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. The elegance of the book lays in the fact that it implies that cities might be physical but aren’t real: cities are in fact layers of mediations on how we create the world through perception. Time, desires, memories, states of mind, languages, symbols, emotional structures - this is the only reality, or truth that you want. Anything we can see and touch might as well be fake like the news. Cities don’t exist, we build them in our head to make sense of things in an ocean of non linearity. You might ask yourself why you pay rent and go to the supermarket at this point, but that’s precisely the price we pay to exist in this form. Ride into the sun
Palermo miracolo in terra, barocco siciliano trasformato in masjid.
Il dialetto siciliano chiama l’albicocca ‘varcoca’ dall’arabo varqouk, povero è ‘meschino’ dall’arabo miskin, pistacchio è ‘fastuca’ dal turco fastouk, fazzoletto è muccatore - dal francese ‘muchoir’, come lavorare diventa ‘travagghiare’ da travailler. C’è anche molto spagnolo, da carnizziria a camurria, parare o ciraza, ma tornando all’arabo pure la toponomastica è ancora qua: Gibellina come Gibilterra vengono da ‘jebel’ - arabo per ‘montagna’. Il paese Mislimeri era ‘Mis al Amir’, la casa del principe.
Lo avevano capito tutti, persino i fascisti: Fiera del Mediterraneo. L’unico fiume navigabile di Spagna si chiama Guadalquivir - viene dall’arabo ‘Wadi al Kabir’ che identifica qualsiasi vallata attraversata da corsi d’acqua. Riscrivere il tracciato e farlo diventare una rotta. Fuori dalla NATO e pernacchie alle patate fritte di Bruxelles. Puzzola Von Der Leyen.
La ricchezza culturale siciliana è la vera storia d’Europa: terra, mare, rispetto e convivenza, ma anche dominazione.
Semi lanciati che attecchiscono e sopravvivono più delle teste dure: sesamo in siciliano è ‘giuggiulena’ dall’arabo gulgulan
