RED DESERT CHRONICLES
Postcards from Ravenna
Humans as a species will disappear in the due time of a geologically ephemeral lightning: it is perfectly useless, then, to stop and think about the how. phenomenons happen; things, beings and revolutions come to an end. Other than the concretionary aftermath of flames and archaic explosions mountains would hint at, and stand as, traces that long gone unfathomable civilizations left in place: our rusty beams, beached wooden ship bodies, broken glasses and rubble mounds carrying ever less colourful insignias, toxic compost towers rising for centuries against gravity trying to assault the sky offer themselves as very lousy comparisons. In the ninety-sixth fragment that made its way onto us, Eraclitus recommends to cast out corpses as fast and as fiercely as dung: it is of no consequence that life itself aspires to dust, that its very construct, inert assembled matter, needs to run further along with uncharged clock hands prior to flaking onto the formerly undreamed of same dust. And that of all of this, a photograph will only catch insensible, unavoidable light, in the instant it would glimpse through.
And those who seek for gold dig up much earth but just find a little, Eraclitus adds up. Trying to trace a history of photography, in 1931 Walter Benjamin recalls in an essay the thundering words of an austrian journalist, written about a century earlier: to try to capture fleeting mirror images is not just an impossible undertaking, the man wrote, but the very wish to do so is blasphemous. And at virillian speed we gallop three lustra into the twenty-first century, when the gaudyness and levity of the jpg and the web set the vain documentary anxiety of a species free, and images thrown swiftly as shurikens chop off your synapses n times each zeptosecond, and at times you hope that the sponge of your eye might evolve to acquire discharge ducts other than lacrimal so that it could throw up, ease down and takes its battle place again in the petronian orgy that rages on.
Rectangles are invading the culture we live in, so quite oracularly wrote the fictional Ariel Lange-Manning, when said iceberg was just shily showing its tip. And as of now you find yourself turning through the pages of a book filled up with rectangles up to the brim, possibly asking yourself about the intention and purpose of its assembly and public diffusion, in a consensus reality where rectangles invaded each one of your limbs wholesale, and the price of that sale is zero. But turning through the pages beyond these words you then become aware that the zero is not what you thought, and running through panels which are maybe as vain as all else, it becomes evident that of the invading rectangles the form and seeming suit has been kept, but there’s nothing here cutting through your meninges as a ninja star would and so, please, just stop. Stop and look.
Shooting a picture turns somebody into a photographer as slicing a salami turns him or her into a butcher, or taking a shower paves the way for competitive swimming. Art is just a word one polishes a craft with, and to master the craft of taking photographs you have to understand what slice of an instant you need to capture light as you you would wish to have it remembered as it bounces, you have to know how wide and convex a glass in front you need to sketch and define margins, you have to know the sinking well of darkness as thoroughly as the nuclear grin of the giant shining star up above in order to best define signs and signals over ever running vanishing points, and once you possess this toolbox you need to inoculate it into oblivion in order to walk around and watch, walk around and watch as an animal would, your head an empty altar ready to accomodate the tumulus you’ll pay homage to remembrance with: the zero of the brain as well as the zero of the eye. In the following panels, maneuvering around as an enchanting Fantomas, the photographer subtracts himself so skillfully and austerely from the portrayed scene, that in the course of the same gesture the whole of the species gets subtracted, leaving in its place only a mysteric requiem sang out of what was dreamed, broken and spilled, built and put in place to weigh upon the thick crust of the world, the motionless staggering of a butterfly caught in a net, tore off from its feral state just when a cruelly grinning time flailed its defeating claws around. At times to find gold you just need to gaze at the horizon. And to fill your eyes with it know the craft of enmesh it in a trap.
I keep thinking I formerly met Adriano in Florence, in nineteen ninety something, during the three days of an experimental music festival where people all over the country coordinated through a mailing list to set devices over tables and show others what those devices were teaching them. But no. This were not where I formerly met him, because we formerly met as textual ghosts, when internet was aghast with pseudonymical entities and amidst a collection of suites I wore half of logoplasm and he wore punck, and we kept coarse html scratchpads stuck somewhere to jot down listened records and existential episodes, and the machine was still running-in and the then common practice to stick pictures and then more pictures over text would have needed short of a decade to settle in, and so meeting in person still had the effect of exploring a land hic sunt leones. A big man as well as a great one, he installs upon those around him an immediate serenity, as a smiling buddha statue rising up from the stone it has been carved with, just because it needs to stretch a bit. His stare won’t pierce you as arrows and darts would but nonetheless will envelop, captivate and encapsulate as an infinite, extremely slow moving zoom would, the almost esoteric practice of pure sight, pure gaze that so exactly the following pictures, sampling through the millions he shot, are able to crystallize and show. The infinite, extremely slow moving zoom over the day the species will be done and the hard to fathom ones that will follow.
And to sculpt a stone and paint a canvas and cover paper with words you really need to stay there and hammer a chisel, stay there and daub with a brush, stay there and write. It’s even worse in photographs, where prior to shooting you have to stay there and watch after you somehow roamed there, having then the care and grace to subtract yourself from what you are framing and forget yourself as a whole, let the rapturous lightning of a moment burst free in time to deliver it to the anomalous device of an impregnable, unalterable memory. To do this one moves and lives alone like the idea of a wolf: the stark truth beyond the coats of arms of art, expression and frail mementos; lonely and forgotten businesses, like wood chunks eroded by saltiness, refinery blocks taken back by rust. Faulty footsteps of somebody passing by, whenever the sea didn’t have care to erase them millennia ago. [Might the eye evolve to its zero, Paolo Ippoliti]
In 2008 I released a record for Adriano Zanni, under the alias Punck, titled “Piallassa ( Red Desert chronicles ). The record was inspired by a coincidence which involved Adriano and Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece “The Red Desert”. The movie was shot in 1964 in the valley of Piallassa, an area north of the city of Ravenna which has a ghostly and suggestive aspect. Adriano Zanni was born in 1964 in Piallassa, and he dedicated to Antonioni’s his more personal and romantic record, built around field recordings of the area he grew up and electronic manipulation. As well as great experimental musician, Adriano is also one of my favourite photographers, with his somber style, so close to my aesthetic ideas. Fifty years after the film’s release, this collection of photos titled “Red Desert chronicles ( Postcards from Ravenna )” is the natural prosecution to Punck’s work published on record in 2008.
Whilst listening to the record evoked images from the place, these images are sounding as those empty and solitary places. [Onga, Boring Machines]
The Red Desert is the place where we live and where Adriano Zanni lives. It is Ravenna, and its surroundings. The name is due to Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie: his Red Desert has made the history of cinema in the world, but has also changed the way its inhabitants are used to perceive and describe it. For the first time, people living here had to look at their town’s image in a mirror and discover it was quite not anymore the way they thought it was. The movie was released back in 1964, the same year Adriano was born. But this coincidence cannot fully explain the craziness of the task he engaged some ten years ago: he retraced Antonioni’s photograms equipped with his camera and, even more important, a sound recorder. The result was a cd, a soundtrack sketching a landscape where chimney stacks reflect themselves in the “piallasse”, which are everglades where salt and fresh water mix as they are half lake and half sea.
Factories and nature, birds and chimneys are screechings people from here have been used to live with since the Sixties. To escape the town you just need to drive along via Baiona to find chemical industries on the right, piallasse on the left, pinewood, beach and sea at the end. In the summer it is easy. In winter, many forget about it. That is maybe one of the reasons why the pictures Adriano has been publishing every single day for more than two years in his blog in Ravenna&Dintorni have represented a date with ourselves, with something we tend to remove from our consciousness. Plus, Adriano has told us of urban suburbs such as our Darsena, the old docks, something we have been speaking for decades, waiting for a restart and a rebirth. Instead, the area is still motionless in its post-industrial decay and nobody dares to go too deeply inside it, inside those places where people used to work and are now abandoned. The same way nobody goes visiting the Circus animals off stage or stops in front of old country houses in ruins, nor in front of those objects the sea gives back to us on the shorelines after a storm. Adriano seems to pick subjects after their splendor, their use, after a metamorphosis that has changed everything around them and made them useless. He does not only shows us what is around us but we are not able to see, but also, sometimes, what we would rather not see.
In this published object, which is not a book, and where you can choose the order you like for pictures, you will find no words by Adriano, you will not find the words accompanying each picture in his blog, conditioning their interpretation, transforming each photo in a short story. In this box, on the contrary, you will find Zanni’s novel and you can choose to put it together the way you like, the output does not really change: this is the red desert today. Black and white, thin, thick, moving, touching, funny, flat, boring, always the same, always different, made of details, of crooked perspectives that tell us of a place that it is quite not the same we think it is. [Red desert Chronicles, Federica Angelini]