Francesco Arcangeli would include it in his “hand-offs”. Franco Arminio in a large “spiritual family” together with Giorgio Morandi adding in the literary field, Corrado Alvaro e Gianni Celati…to go back to Leopardsthen finding links in the cinematography of Cesare Zavattini or in the music of Alessandro Cicognini e Nino Rotauntil concluding with a great photographer such as Luigi Ghirri. Because history does not exist, nor does time understood in a linear and progressive sense; what stands out instead is that troubled conscience that led the authoritative art historian to measure his shadow on the very high wall of the courtyard in front of the house, a “wall with a bit of anguish” in seeing the silhouette disappear, little by little, at dusk.
Archaeologist of photography, Arminio encounters dazzling images of a low boot that arrive as apparitions, in the era of “the evaporation of the Father” he would say Lacan. Poetic visual fragments, sparks of meaning available to those who nurture a caressing, alert gaze. Deserted squares, extinguished hearths, ancient agglomerations “bricked” with tuff like old anthills, ghost places where the old rarely go out and the young have left. It is in the rural streets of the South that Arminio, like a “rag-picker”, collects the waste, the fragments, the residues of the world to reconstruct a present that can be the immediate past through images of memory. The time that has become here the broken clock of a bell tower stopped before the war, to the Byzantines, miraculously reveals the secret of those metaphysical countries, eternal like the breaths passed, the footprints stuck in the mud of the country paths, the glassy eyes of the animals that , for millennia, they have been grazing in the same way, with a still proud look, because there is a “precise sun” as the author will say in one of his books.
And so we imagine the dialect that resists, the humid smell of the tomatoes passed in the cellar, the slow movement of the fly curtains between the open doors, the traces, the sense of the sweetness of life, a community life, a place populated by “anonymous” who have made history, old people abandoned in disoriented countries in the same way as poets or artists.
In this ode to silence and reflection the elegiac, twilight atmosphere becomes imbued with the sacred, not intended in a mystical sense but rather in the manner of another fellow villager, Giordano Bruno, who saw its remains in everything. There is no lost archetypal truth to recover, no desire for redemption because Ours is himself the “presence” of that no man’s land in which human shadows wander without knowing how long they will remain, in those places of transit between life and death.
The trauma of loss is a wound so alive, bleeding, to the point that each image becomes hard, angular, non-compromising as if it were an ideological declaration far from the “powder” of the world and at the same time so close to the abyss of the author, a living source of the unrepresentable, of that aura at sunset.
Hence the “Morandian” comparison according to which: «What matters is to reach rock bottom» in order to «start looking at things again» in fact – Franco will write – the cure will be precisely «looking outside», unlike the anesthetized gaze of those who do not he never has anything to see.
Here are doors and windows walled up in earthquake-stricken towns, wrecks of homes, wrinkled faces and decayed teeth already eroded by oblivion, images born from philokaly of Arminius. In each one shines the love for stories and for the tales of those invisible or “out of place” realities where the past is written on the ruins, in the names of the streets, in the local dialect, in the chickens in the squares, in the doors of the houses left open, in Vito’s tavern and even before Luigi’s, in that enormous Bisaccese tree whose branches look like the small arms of the deceased Tullio Petrillo. Arminio moves like a “ghost hunter” as Sebald would say, in search of that involuntary memory that gives meaning to life through memory, that reconstructs one’s identity like the flavor of madeleines to Proust.
The “seismograph of the villager” thus becomes a seismograph of the soul, of its repercussions, of its tremors and makes us think of when Gianni Celati, in ’79, in a period of existential confusion, took the bus to revisit the places of his mother or when Luigi Ghirri, an Emilian photographer, created, together with other colleagues and Celati himself, Viaggio in Italia or when Zavattini, with the photographer Paul Strand, published Un Paese. All testimonies, textual and photographic, of “anythingness” that give the landscape a simple, genuine face, far from stereotyped images, from new reinforced concrete buildings, from intensive cultivation, from urban pollution, from faces with make-up. And so to find the provincial road of souls, where postcards from the dead reach the living, it is necessary to maintain that sensitive gaze towards things. It is precisely there that the world ends up opening up to a new beginning.
The author
Franco Arminio was born in 1960 in Bisaccia, in Eastern Irpinia, where he still lives. He has published around thirty books, which have reached tens of thousands of readers. Among many: Journey to the crater (Sironi), Strong wind between Lacedonia and Candela (The third), Terracarne (Mondadori), Postcards from the dead (Night time), Moving geography of internal Italy (Bruno Mondadori), Give way to the trees (Chiareletters), Looking after your eyes (Bompiani), Letter to those who weren’t there (Bompiani), Studies on love (Einaudi), Sacred minor (Einaudi). As a “paesologist” he created the La luna ei calanchi festival in 2012, an event of which he is the artistic director and which takes place every year in Aliano (MT), with thousands of participants from all over Italy.
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– 2024-05-06 00:56:24
