We Talk with Luigi Pagliarini, artist and art curator, that has inaugurated a personal piece called Communication Graveyard. The piece it’s inside a collecctive exhibition called Deambulatorios de una jornada, en el principio y el projecto Tindaya, produced by Centro de Arte Juan Ismael of Puerto Rosario and curated by the spanish critic Nilo Casares: this is a really particular art exhibiton, held on a desert island in the atlantic sea, in front of Africa, and it’s all about the relationship between natural and artificial, between ecosystem and human action, between art and landscape.
ECO: how do you think that the relationship between the artist and the landscape has changed ?
PAGLIARINI: I think, shortly, that the relationship between the artist and the landscape has not changed much. What is changing, on the other hand, is the landscape. We moved to landscape situations that were relatively unthinkable a few decades ago. We switched from a material world to a virtual one. And I’m not thinking about cyberspace only, but about the micro world of chemistry, biology and genetics as well as macro worlds of the human exploration of the Cosmos and so on. Undoubtedly all that will change, not only the existing relationship between art and sceneries, but the interpretation of the meaning of such a relationship.
E: In the DEAF 07 Conferences, an activist of Greenpeace has told that the western world sends to the “third world” at least 50 tons of technological trash per year, meanwhile the technology become old faster and faster every year. Since in your Communication Graveyard art piece you present the same themes, what do you think can be done? Who do you think
should do it?
P: Well, simpler than that, I am an artist not a politician and I do not like role confusion – very typical of our age where access to media and pop communication is much easier than in the past and induces many authors to act in a political way instead of an artistic one. And that’s a mistake, since art is more valuable. Therefore, me, as an artist, (or artivist, in this case) I can only try to let people point at the problem. Indeed, I think artists, like in a Zen practice, should let all of their energies converge to the analysis, the conceiving and the realization of the art piece. Of course, I could also come up with practical and political solutions – and I think there are many- right now. But, look, this is not my job. I, as an artist, try to elicit common people’s consciousness or unconsciousness on the social and human problems – in the way, for example, Orwell did. This is because I believe that consciousness and civic sense are still the most effective, ecological and painless solution to any malfunction in the human societies.
E: It’s quite symptomatic that this kind of exhibition was organized on a desert island like Fuerteventura, near the African border, that as the Mega-cities Project’s report reminds us, it rappresent the baloance of our world, because for every “first world” city, there’s a “third world” city that will receive the trash. What do you think about this feedback process,
in which our trash is asked to become part of the developmental resources for the third world?
P: The initial idea was to build a Communication Graveyard for mobile phones only. This was because we buy around one million mobile phones per day and recycle very-very few. This was because my installation was going to be located in Africa, a continent where in some countries (such as Congo) there are new slaves that starve and dig lithium in caves only using their fingernails, with a gun machine pointed against their face. Because these men will never see the light anymore and because they will die in the mines, while we easily throw our mobile phones in the rubbish bin, incredibly polluting the earth and the sea, and condemning one more of them. Because I did intend to light up all of this, which is the main African problem (slavery and robbery). But this was not my only intention and there many other observation points and meaning of the Communication Graveyard, which might result less readable.
Anyway, to give you a direct answer, of course, yes. Eventually, when we’re not able to recycle (shall I say when it “costs” too much? or shall I say when it costs too much right now and we decide, therefore, to postpone the “bill” for the next generations?) we might want to donate the usable waste – because we also reverse the real rubbish, like for the radioactive waste – to the third world countries. But, again, I’m not a politician and, on the contrary, honestly, I feel that in this way we’re kind of washing our sense of guilt away. Indeed, I believe that we should try to let the third world catch up with the first one, both as cultural and economical independency. In my opinion, the mandatory goal is to let these people emancipate. We shouldn’t ask third world people to live in a perpetual second-hand state, because this would push them to abandon their own culture, roots, and traditions. That would force them to leave their countries again and again and to lose their dignity for good.
