I learned to write at the age of five, as an external listener, in the first year of primary school, which I attended as a non-enrolled student, as I hadn't yet reached the prescribed age of six. But I started in January, and so many months late from the start of lessons, and the delay was reflected in some letters of the alphabet that I didn't know how to write, like the capital D, and since there was a dictation every day, I used to write "ettato", without the D. I tried to copy it from my benchmate, Salvatore Trigila (first surname then first name), who shielded it with his tiny little hand (I remember it as if it were today), and so there was no way, just "ettato". I didn't even know how to write the number eight and I used to make two circles, one above the other, so here I managed. I wasn't good at composing essays or stories and I always wrote, then, then, then. But then I got better and fell in love with writing and numbers, even though I still don't know if writing and numbers fell in love with me. I met Ben in the eighties, during my time in Toulouse, Carcassonne and the regions of the Pyrenees and Provence, with many car trips to and from Milan, where I then lived permanently, with long stops in Marseille. Ben Vautier, a famous Fluxus artist, had been recommended to me by Giuseppe Chiari. I met him in Nice and was immediately entangled in his web of statements and beautiful calligraphy, which established a link between the signification and de-signification of writing, as a code and as a graphic apparatus, in a non-logical logic that aimed for self-signification.
In him, as in Chiari, there was a Dadaist will to immerse words, meaning, in a great Arno, a linguistic river par excellence, of interlocks and liberations, that could not be grasped by anyone and marked an anarchy of thought, made of sweetness, but no less inexorable and determined, in its critique of a fetishism of the word, reduced by too many to a handmaiden of alienating automatisms. There is an analogy with free words and poems to be thrown away, but it stops at the surface, as it aims to go deeper, founded not on an open phase of contestation, but on mimesis, on formal concealment. There is a great angelic quality in all this, but also a line of conduct that strives to anticipate the capacity to seem and to be, at the same time. To pretend to be harmless and to be, in essence, a force of transformation, ideal and real, also availing itself of a metaphysics drawn from Magritte, fluttering between us, like everything and its opposite, like the art of art.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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