I became aware of Beuys many years ago; the media conduit was Vettor Pisani, with one of his installations and performances. He intrigued me greatly, and from that moment on, I followed both of them, so close yet so different. I later saw Beuys in Gibellina, a devastated land, then reborn, for Lodovico Corrao. I spent a lot of time with Pisani, in workshops, kitchens, and studios, at Nicola Incisetto’s Nuova San Rocco in Naples, with the silver and precious stone Capri, and the railway gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Beuys and Lucrezia de Domizio accompanied me for years, in reality and virtually, through our shared love for agriculture, for the earth, our generous mother, whom we, through sloth, perversion, or apathy, ignore, exploit, and violate. Today, from May to November 2021, at the Tate Gallery in London, the dream announced by B. in Kassel in 1982 will come to life, with the aim of carrying out a Forestation instead of City, planting seven thousand oak trees to raise ecological awareness, protect psychophysical well-being, and immerse ourselves in a more “wholesome” nature.
It happened in 2007 that the British duo Acroyd & Harvey went to collect acorns from B.'s oaks, which had now become generating, those that gave rise to the trees that are now at the Tate. After the exhibition, seven of these will remain permanently in the woodland, bearing witness to the need for the defence of nature, to be proclaimed in defence of ourselves, of our present and our future. It is a hundred years since B.'s birth, and theoretically he could still be biographically among us, but he is, ideally-really, in these plants and in all that he did, which belongs to an ethical and a sublime, which were, are, of him with him and will be, as long as we know how to plant a tree, smell a flower, loving together with the divine, of nature, of architecture, of art, of cities, knowing how to be with herbs, plants, and wolves.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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