The hamster wheel of the event factory

Federculture president Andrea Cancellato looking at the August weather tells me: cultural activity if it does not have a project becomes entertainment. Said without the snootiness of kultur. With the realism of one who presides over an attempt to make new representation of the many who make and eat with culture working in the entertainment society. Representational squinting to hold together directors and workers of prestigious museums meeting in Ravello and the numbers just churned out by Unioncamere telling us that the August break mobilises 41 thousand companies that from the seas to the mountains are at work for festivals, discotheques, fitness centres, events and festivals, running in the hamster wheel of eventology. Realism in trying to break down and recompose that epochal reversal of social composition for which the society of entertainment, culture, is no longer a superstructure, but a structure from which to start and narrate this new civilisation. I wonder what the philosopher with the beard who looked at the pianist and the dancers as labourers without work that I quoted in the District of Pleasure would think of this, telling of the cubists and those dressed as Mickey Mouse in the theme parks. It was Rimini that has now become a platform for beachgoers from Jesolo to Gallipoli. It rose to the sky for the cost of beach umbrellas and as a Bolkestein-resistant in the heat of August. It may seem strange to mention a one-night event on the beach at the Demanio Marittimo in Senigallia. Here for years a heretical eventologist, Cristiana Colli, and an eventologist urban planner, Pippo Ciorra, have been summoning creatives and scholars to a study seminar not for night bathing and music, but looking at the short sea from which one can see the fragmentation and recomposition of what we used to call Yugoslavia. We confront each other by making the sea an augmented reality starting from our Salone del Mobile, celebrating The Lion and the Fox, a dialogue book between Leonetti and Volponi, or as this year from the living with the University of Belgrade and Sarajevo that tragically anticipated the urbanicide we see in Ukraine and Gaza. For one night only, we retrieve memories of the Adriatic taught by Sergio Anselmi in Senigallia, from Matvejević's Mediterranean Breviary and then encounter Braudel's epic of material civilisation. Cultured quotations that get in the way of the hiatus between design and entertainment. Which prompted Colli to create a work that fits well into the ambivalence of the society of entertainment. Titled The Adriatic Sea, he has edited a 600-page tome in this age of the world's tourist flows, making it an editorial, tourist and cultural project to tell the story of the Adriatic platform. With maps his going by territories downloading augmented reality on the ground with iconic images that refer to the feeling, with project putting together from Trieste to Santa Maria di Leuca the restless ones that make culture and history of the territory in metamorphosis, thus giving voice and tale to the many who have learnt from History. To immemorize, to remember the future, Bloch and Benjamin would say. Which I think has fuelled the project-programme of a dusty municipality, Volpedo, 1130 inhabitants, which has convened four days of discussion on the Workers' Path (11-14 September), making "the irruption of the present a need that comes from the past": the studio-museum of the painter Pelizza da Volpedo. That of the Fourth State on its way from the fields and workshops. A great work questioning the leap from the 19th to the 20th century. In an earlier work now in the Brera Museum he had called it La fiumana. How we need a Pelizza da Volpedo today! to paint the new fiumana of social composition. Treated in the piazzetta of the Quarto Stato starting from the consciousness of place in southern Piedmont community/work, manufacturing, logistics, finance, the gender journey of female workers, the metamorphosis of representation on rights issues. Finally, we close by looking for answers from where I started with the president of Federculture: can you eat with culture? I know for certain that without culture you cannot eat the future. Comforted by a peripatetic microcosm that ends up in the mountains. In that Valcamonica that goes from the premium resort of Ponte di Legno to the small towns overlooking Lake Iseo where the great artist Christo made us walk on water and in Brescia where Tata bought Iveco from the Indian Ocean. In Rogno on the same days as Volpedo, the CGIL's 'founded on work' festival will be held. The young secretary invited Landini to follow the path of the workers from Iveco to that valley in metamorphosis where the iron rod is confronted with the torrent of tourism, entertainment and living and working in the new 'territorial factories.

Bonomi@aaster.it