INSIDE THE HELL OF EXCLUSION
di Graziella Longoni

“The hell of the living is not something that will come to pass; if there is one,
then it is the one that is already here, the hell in which we live every day,
that we make by staying together. Here are two ways not to suffer from this.
The first is easy for many people: to accept the hell and become
part of it until you don’t see it anymore.
The second way is risky and requires continual care and learning:
to seek out and learn to recognize who and what, in the middle of hell,
is not hell and make it last and give it space.”

Translated from I. Calvino, Le città invisibili

Walls that are seen, walls that live inside us

To go beyond amnesia and to unveil awareness, tracing an aesthetic-poetical path within the abysses of exclusion, separation, negation, active and violent nihilism; to give a face to the hell that we live in every day without recognizing it, because we call it by reassuring names: safety, peace, democracy, freedom, defense of identity.
Placing herself at the horizon of wakefulness, the artist forces herself to look inside unprecedented pain and the waste of blind force, launching a disquieting meditation on what Hannah Arendt called the “primary ontological crime”: the destruction of the human being, the erasing of his unique character, the annihilation of his relational identity, the reduction of the world of human plurality to an uninhabitable dwelling, where a sick sentiment dominates, a sentiment arising from the ruins of fear, hate and grievance.
Here are the walls conceived as defense systems against the “Other” who threatens our existence and steals our world of things; the walls that open terrible wounds in the territory, transforming the places of life into immense prisons; the walls of antipersonnel mines, of electrified barbed wire, the heavy barriers of cement and steel, erected to prevent seeing the “Other”, constructed to distance him from our living space, and to kill him when he dares to cross that border that forces him to live only like a foreigner.
Here are the walls of fire that distance and incinerate; the stinking walls that contain the survivors of the crossings, depriving them of any dignity; the sinister walls of prisons where tortures are perpetrated among smiles, swears, photographs of the “animal” left groaning on the ground, covered and stained by the fluids of his exhausted body, a body wounded by shame in which the victim will no longer be able to recognize himself.
Here are the walls of the patriarchy with its veils that separate the female from the male, that hide a woman’s body seen as a means of spiritual perdition. At the same time patriarchs decide to whom that body belongs and decree her insignificance in the public sphere; women can only live in hiding or in the revolutionary passion that condemns her to martyrdom.
Here are the mental fences of patriarchy that suffocate the dignity of the female body, undressing it, depersonalizing it, reducing it to goods to be sold in the inviting market of sexual liberation.
Here is the disguising fakery of patriarchal ideology which cancels sexual difference, celebrating an homologating and mutilating emancipation where women, covered in military garb, are finally equal to men in exercising the power that brings death.
Walls everywhere, walls that can be seen, walls that rise like emblematic icons of a time that seems to recognize and transmit only two-faced and strangely complementary messages, messages to reassure addressed to those like us and messages of threats addressed to the “Other”.
And also walls that cannot be seen but that live inside us like rigid barriers that imprison the mind, making it incapable of interrogating itself on the meaning of what happens in this world of hardness and exclusion, dominated by the “sad passions”, passions that erase the future as a hope, evoking it only as a menace. It is an empty future that makes hearts cold, unfeeling, full of grievance, obsessively turned to finding a scapegoat in the futile attempt to distance fear, impotence, the disgregation that impoverishes existence, condemning it to the repetition of gestures without animation, carried out in a present that erases everything, memory and desire.
Libera Mazzoleni does not accept becoming a cynical and indifferent part of the hell in which we live. For precisely this reason she decides to view it, from the inside, undertaking the responsibility of representing it through images rooted in daily events and characterized by a bare realism that does not allow reassuring ways out. Next to the images, poetic words try to tell the disorientation felt when confronted with hell, words that originate from listening to pain, to inflicted humiliation, to petrifying silence, to shame that suppresses the will to live, to annihilating power.

A meta-morphosis to encounter the “Other”
The artist doesn’t just produce images of events; she doesn’t just recall ideologies of exclusion, placing herself as a gaze that sees and a mind that thinks; she puts into action an alienating meta-morphosis that involves her, entirely, in the first person. In fact she gives her face and her body to the women denied by wearing the burkha, to the women covered by the chador, to the veiled women armed with rifles and destined for martyrdom, to the women soldiers equipped to kill the enemy, to women who have been humiliated, stripped bare and blinded in the dark rooms of torture.
Breaking with a rigidly closed and self-reflecting identity that celebrates the “same” while excluding any form of the “Other”, Libera Mazzoleni stages a “liquid identity”: that is, one that melts into other forms of existence. She does this in order to be able to understand and to recount, from the inside, those ways of being-in-the-world that are generated by reclusion, negation, shame, wish of death, by the smiling torturer’s sadism.
A woman artist tries to live both the wounded existence of the victim as well as the brutalizing existence of the woman-torturer and tries to speak to one and the other, expressing, to the former, her pained solidarity and, to the latter, her infinite distance.
Like a trip of discovery, transformation, continuous displacements of her own “Self”, of sinking into memory and imagination, this meta-morphosis, carried out on her own body is a departure from the main road traced by blind conformity of identity as well as a destruction of the rhetoric of power, all in the aim to exhibit the poverty of that other vision of the world.
Thus the walls appear to be what they really are: devices conceived and constructed to prevent the world from becoming a “home open to those who come” (Arendt); brutal devices that transform the world into the hell of the living, an inhospitable place of subservience and homologation, a barred fortress against the entrance of the “Other” who must be pushed back because he is foreign, hunted because he is clandestine, killed because he is an enemy.

Art as a “procedure of truth”
At this point a question naturally arises: from what place of art does Libera Mazzoleni’s work takes its procedure?
Alain Badiou writes of an art, which “is in itself a procedure of truth” and “an individual thought”, which originates in the historical nature of the event and is maintained (even during the productive deployment of the artwork) within the uniqueness that characterizes the event itself. This art aims to recount the event in the multiplicity of meanings that it carries within itself, preventing it from disappearing into the abyss of the universal, where uniqueness disappears, sucked up by the bloodless and disincarnate form of the concept.
In Badiou’s definition we hear the original sense of truth as “alétheia”, revealing that which always shows itself in the uniqueness of its own being.
This is the place from which Libera Mazzoleni speaks to us, the historical place of events that happen and that the artist names one by one, questioning their meaning, placing them always in relation to things – in this case, walls – with the men and women who build them, bringing to light, at the same time, a horizon of meanings to which she refers in an attempt to comprehend herself and the world in which we live.
Thinking in the first-person singular, she can activate that meta-morphosis which -- in the diversity of forms assumed by a subject that has become a nomad – speaks not of a generic human being but of a “subject in flesh and blood”, with a precise name and visage; of a subject that gives death and a subject that dies; of a subject that refuses the “Other” and of a refused subject that disappears from the gaze; of a subject that wounds and a subject that is wounded; of a male subject who drags a female subject into the violent world of patriarchy.
By recalling what constitutes hell to our memory, Libera Mazzoleni forces us to look, with questioning eyes, into the abyss of denying the “Other”.
Hannah Arendt, who didn’t hesitate to look inside the hell of totalitarianism which renders the human being superfluous and who always questioned herself on the sense of eliminating the human, wrote: “ Thinking and remembering (...) are the human way of putting down roots, of occupying one’s own place in the world, in which we all arrive as foreigners”.
April 2007