On the poetics of artistic suicide

posted by on 2016.03.14, under Uncategorized
14:

I have not updated this blog in several months now: various reasons, some more personal than others, have taken a role in this. I felt though the strong need to write again here.
No, I won’t show any code this time. Simply because there is no algorithm for the kind of artistic pieces I want to point your attention to.
Rather, I want to talk about what I consider one of the greatest performance acts of recent years. Italian street artist Blu has recently erased all the murals he had created in his very own city of Bologna during the last twenty years. The manifesto and the words explaining the reasons behind this decision have been left to Wu Ming, a collective of writers active since the mid ’90s.
You can read everything here. (There is an english translation as well.)
In an impressive act of artistic suicide, at the same time creative and destructive, aesthetic and poetic, Blu has reminded us that art has still the power to challenge and raise questions concerning urbanism, commonalities, public spaces, recuperation, power.
By subtracting those walls to a since too long ongoing process of cultural and economic reappropriation by a repressive establishment, he has left big “grayboards” for all to take part in the everyday struggle for freedom. The brush is in our hands, and it’s leaking.
These phenomena of reappropriation are not particular to street art.
“Coding”, the topic of this blog, is nowadays a buzzword everyone wants to pronounce. A piece of cake shot with low depth of field and Instagram filter everyone wants to taste. The latest golden egg chicken, or whatever. With various blogs and online magazines feeding you the latest technological wonders and the new emergent trends in this or that artistic field, where has the sense of exploration gone? How can we bring it back, and make it challenging once again, freeing it from the multiple petty boxes the corporate machine wants us to frame it?
Can we bring digital art “in the streets”, or will it always be confined to our smart and self-reassuring conventions and gatherings?

After a few hours from its repainting, the following writings have appeared on one of the gray walls left

La felicità che mi era sempre stata negata.
Avevo il diritto di viverla quella felicità.
Non me l’avete concesso.
Allora peggio per me, peggio per voi, peggio per tutti.
Rimpianti si, ma in ogni caso nessun rimorso.”

For a little while, we had a glimpse of a Blu sky.

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