by Emanuele Beluffi for “Il Giornale OFF”
50 years after the assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Simone Meneghello’s exhibition “Meneghello meets Pasolini: non-dualism” at the Ticinese Art Gallery in Milan offers an immersive and performative experience that goes beyond simple commemoration. The exhibition does not focus on Pasolini’s death, but explores his work through a radical manipulation of his texts, transforming words into autonomous visual entities. Through the use of a typewriter, ancient books and installations, Meneghello and the public itself rework Pasolini’s writings, creating a dialogue between the signifier and the signified which also involves artificial intelligence. An artistic experience that challenges traditional reading and invites deep reflection on language and memory. On the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini – henceforth PPP – Simone Meneghello amazes us with his very difficult exhibition at the Ticinese Art Gallery in Milan, an “immersive” experience – as we like to say today – that couldn’t be more immersive: a few days after the inauguration, in fact, a performative experience orchestrated by Meneghello himself followed which actively involved the public. But what are we talking about?
First of all, let’s clear away the anecdotal: it is true that the exhibition “Meneghello meets Pasolini: non-dualism” by Simone Meneghello is a tribute to PPP on the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination, but the exhibition project stays away from interpretative hypotheses on the death of the writer and director, nor does it advance reporting information in an imaginative form – are we or are we not talking about visual art? – on his contribution to the history of literature and cinema, nor does he go into historical excursus on that Italy of the Seventies crossed by the so-called “mysteries” and the infamous “deviant secret services”.
So Meneghello vs PPP does not want to enlighten us about history but about something perhaps deeper, certainly “metaphysical”. But then what is there to see in the display of grace? And what did the subsequent performative experience with the public who was an active part consist of?
It’s easy to say: a gallery transformed into a sort of stage but without structural interventions. The scenography is created by the tools of Meneghello’s trade, that is, a Lettera 32 typewriter – oh no, it is not the Lettera 22 of “Cilindro” Montanelli -, sheets of books yellowed by time on which we see untranslatable graphemes and other books, many other books without writing, without words, arranged like wall sculptures and/or site-specific installations.
From the superposition of texts to the use of movable type, from the use of the volume to the installations, “I remain, as and with my works, poised on the border between life and death, between the poetic moment and the writing”, says Simone Meneghello.
A dear philosopher friend of mine from my university days, Paolo Natale, wrote a little book entitled “Words before language” and, in retrospect and after eons, “Words before language” sounds like the perfect epigraph to this exhibition. In fact, we read from the press release: “the artist carries out a radical operation on Pasolini’s texts and the poet’s words, removed from their communicative function, are transformed into autonomous presences that inhabit the surface of the work. No longer vehicles of meaning, but concrete entities where Pasolini’s texts become visual material and stratifications that preserve the memory of the language. Pasolini is present in a physical and unavoidable way: his sentences, his verses and his thoughts remain integrally in the work, while escaping reading.”
Of course it would perhaps be necessary to have taken a course in semiotics or linguistics to grasp the concept, but the “non-dualism” Meneghello vs PPP speaks for itself because it speaks the language of art and therefore (almost) everyone grasps it: in this sense the performances “(io) so” recently staged in the gallery had their say with the active involvement of the public who, under the direction of Meneghello, repeated that “radical experience” on a chosen part of the “Scritti corsari”, the anthology that includes the very famous article in the Corrierone by PPP “Io so“.
With the difference that the “I” is placed in parentheses, in a kind of phenomenological suspension because here, in the gallery, it is not PPP but ourselves who “know”. Or at least we try. Artificial intelligence has also done it: in a technological context where AI now reigns supreme everywhere, a contribution could not be missing which we, imitating Benedetto Croce, can christen as “the contribution to the criticism of myself”.
But who is my self? Is it that (I) placed in brackets that gives the title to the performance “(I) know”? Is it the “not me” of Simone Meneghello who created “creative chaos” of the words of PPP with the typewriter? Is it the “consciousness” – written in one hundred quotation marks – of the AI?
In fact, among the works on the wall we see a text written by the AI always on a sheet of an old book, the same work of “radical transformation” on the words of PPP carried out primarily by Meneghello and by the public during the performance “(io) so”.
As above: it is not PPP who “knows” but ourselves. Or at least we try: it is a non-encounter with PPP, a placing of meaning in brackets with respect to the signifier, where the word, so important for PPP between pirate writings and cinematography, multiplies by stratifying itself in the graphemes that are inexorably beaten by us and by Meneghello with a Speechless Letter 32 on old pages yellowed by time, that time which, 50 years after that infamous November 1975, the day of PPP’s assassination, has still not come to pass made a gentleman and did not give us any certain truth about the motive, instigators and executors. A chaos that in news reality is not creative but destructive.