ROCCO (SIFFREDI) E I SUOI FRATELLI

Andrea Mastrovito 

This was the last room I designed and made for the exhibition. For its achievement I thought of Martin Creed’s work, and of a Luigi Polla’s tale. When Luigi met him – one night he told me – Martin, who was no more then a boy, showed him a salt and a pepper shakers, made in copper and steel. He leaned them on the table where they were eating. They were almost invisible among all the dishes. He explained him that, by his nature, he didn’t want to to anything. But not doing anything, for an artist, is impossible. And so he had always found the way to make the easiest thing, to do the minimal effort. I have always been struck by this tale (I recall his filled-with-air balloons, his creased papers, his metronomes…). So I thought that an empty room would have been perfect to close the course of the exhibition. Even because, then, I was too tired to do something more. But actually something was missing, a grip to the slang violence of Testori’s stories, invented and lived stories. And so I remebered his frienship/unfriendship with Luchino Visconti. Visconti who was inspired  by Testori’s Il ponte della Ghisolfa for his Rocco e i suoi fratelli. At that time they were friends, respecting each other; but then happened that Alain, Testori’s partner, didn’t get a part – promised – in Ludwig, Giovanni was very pissed off and started to hate him (so hard that he presented public excuses after Visconti’s death) so bad that in the unpublished epilogue of L’Ambleto, he rails against the “sozzialista registore”, insulting him and saddling him with sins and perversions: “for you, to love, is like having a dog’s cock to lick”. That’s why I took as a starting point the playbill of Rocco e i suoi fratelli, where is depicted Simone while raping Nadia. The violence of the act is mitigated by the invisible transparence of the image obtained scratching the matt glass of the french door, whose counterpart is, on the left wall, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, a work made for my personal exhibition Postmodern, in 2006. In this work the relationship between man and woman is inverted (literaly, the woman is on the top), and the Magritte quotation is explaining also here “what love is”, playing on the fact that “pipe” in french means – as everybody knows – pipe, and blowjob, as well…