with Andrea Celeste La Forgia
There are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities
THE INDEPENDENT, MAXXI’s programme dedicated to independent thought and practice, presents Max Fletcher’s special project in collaboration with Andrea Celeste La Forgia: There are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities. The work is the result of a performance conceived for the FRIENDSHIP | SOLIDARITY | ALLIANCES summit on the occasion of the five-year anniversary of THE INDEPENDENT.
Within the framework of the Summit, British artist Max Fletcher – currently residing at the British School in Rome – has produced a series of three canvases during a complex action in which words, painting and gestures combine in a critical rethinking of the past as a means of building friendships, solidarity and alliances. Pasolini is the essential reference for both the performance and the canvases, which contain three excerpts from dialectal theatrical texts taken from Pasolini himself and two of his beloved writers, Pirandello and Bertolazzi.
The selected passages – translated into English – offer a humorous representation of moments centred on a sense of community and solidarity, notions that Pasolini attributes to the dialect, understood as Gramsci did, namely as an emancipatory form of literature capable of subverting or contrasting the concepts of linear progress and formal unification.
photo © Fondazione MAXXI