Country primer… it wants to be a journey through countries through words and images. Countries need policies against depopulation, but these policies must be conceived and implemented knowing who is in the countries and what the atmosphere is like. To produce results that have not arrived so far, we first need to look at the places. The gaze is the first form of regard. And then you need a mix of intimacy and distance.
I, who have always lived in a country, will work with Bruno Palma, a videomaker who lives between Rome and a town in Lazio. We met because he often comes to my town (his parents’ place of origin). Our work will proceed by investigating a different question each time, knowing that they are connected.
Abandonment is the result of mistrust, but mistrust in turn is the result of abandonment. We continue to investigate the size of countries very little, as if we had an allergy, to the minimum, to the marginal. Attention grows only when tragedies such as earthquakes and floods arrive and therefore when the minimum becomes the maximum and the margin rises to the center of the news. It’s about getting used to looking at countries in their usual days, in their ordinary events, knowing that we have an enormous heritage, because only in Italy do there exist countries that are very different from each other, as if they belonged to unique worlds.
In a world that tends to become all the same, countries are an important heritage of diversity. In a world that is realizing that loneliness is among its greatest diseases, countries are a reserve of community. Their regeneration can become a barrier against the isolation of individuals and the diseases that this isolation produces.
#primer #Italian #towns #journey #abandonment
– 2024-04-15 21:34:32
