Two thousand two hundred and seventy-five

It’s the number of masks collected from the ground by Giovanni Presutti. To make sense of this "uplift", we have to rewind the artistic tape of the Tuscan visual activist. We will find evidence that weaves a sail route towards a more sustainable future. Away from a present of fine microplastics, floods, mountains of waste, harmful emissions, and releases of responsibility that cement the best intentions in a mask of impotence. An invitation to explore the boundaries of a declining Western paradigm to undertake a journey where certainties fade, especially for generations to come.

© Installation view '2275' by Giovanni Presutti, at Villa Rospigliosi, Prato, 2024

Let's start from here, then, from a gesture. Lifting is synonymous with relief, which is also a liberation. It is no coincidence that Soulèvements is also the title of the gigantic exhibition monograph on the vast and uncomfortable theme of the insurrection at the Jeu De Paume (Paris, 2016). Uprising in English. And isn't that what Presutti does in the wake of illustrious names? "No haras nada with clamar". Because crying gets you nowhere, says Francisco de Goya in a drawing from over two centuries ago. «Rise up is a gesture», we read in the catalog of the aforementioned exhibition that it traces an arc of social practices of lifting. Social because there is an end or rather a new beginning. Maybe, hopefully. Lift, lift from the ground, and collect the mask. Furthermore in the statement of gesture interventions: «Before even attempting to carry out a voluntary and shared "action," we rise up with a simple gesture that suddenly overturns the burden that submission had, until then, placed on us».I would add that lifting a weight, even a symbolic one, from the ground, therefore, means overcoming a force, gravity. And the environment is a challenge. It forces a change. Not just climate. Of thought. That is disobedience. Georges Didi-Hubermans writes, «It does not suffice to disobey. It is critical, also, that disobedience – the refusal, the call for insubordination – be transmitted to others in the public space». It is not enough to disobey, the French art historian reminds us, or to overcome the "blockade," to "throw it into the air" as on a pirate radio, to reiterate its message. One, two, three… try counting to 2,275. «To give it, in this way, a political meaning». Because it comes out of the individual enclosure and takes on a public, therefore political, dimension. And here, we discover art, participatory when conceived as public, en plein air.

© Installation view '2275' by Giovanni Presutti, at Villa Rospigliosi, Prato, 2024

Thus, we arrive at the "ragnaia" of Villa Rospirosi, where Presutti stages the uprising. Like a plant, the artwork needs a milieu. A context nourishes us. The "ragnaia," a typical element of historic Italian gardens, was a fowling system, stringing one or more nets of thin wire (spiders) between groups of trees. Later, it indicated a grove where you can cool off in summer. The collected masks shape a visual totem representing the waste society placed on a threshold. A closed gate prevents entry, even to the eye. It symbolizes tout court a mental caesura. Philipp Blom (2020) writes well about this, or the inability to think of alternative solutions in the language we speak today, thanks to the images we have in our heads. Therefore, the historian claims that other images (photos) are needed. Finding new images that are up to these challenges is the "peace project" of the present. Everything else follows from it. So, we read Presutti's intervention in Prato, a conceptual map describable by a different "legend" of peace. The memory of the spider trap as a bird trap becomes a habitus for rethinking the present and its song—the metaphor for a new garden idea. The philosopher Venturi Ferriolo (2019) summarized it well when speaking of the poet as the heart and the garden as the theater of the world, where we observe the relationships that guarantee man's life interconnected with the other animals, vegetables, and mineral elements, which make the garden the deep and true place of recognition. In Presutti's view, a network of subtle cohabitations and mutual inclinations then enriches the geometric verb of the "Italian" garden where the falling water that wets the roots is a sonnet that rolls towards a common destiny, humus, that of the sea where the song of creatures originates—even the human.

Sense, therefore, of belonging to a land that is not silent. Indeed, it is a thin critical zone, as Bruno Latour would say, of connective tissue and intimate fiber that unites. New images are therefore needed to break that cognitive isolation, of which the coronavirus epidemic is perhaps the most recent manifestation. The slow motion of the mask becomes that of a leaf freed by the wind, which magnifies its decay, the future rotting that nourishes the life cycle. But human things often interfere with flourishing, and their wisdom is not that of a mast. Therefore, every gesture, suggests Presutti, has its opposite. The lifting. A poetic gesture, of course, but also anthropological and behavioral since it denies the disposable, physical expression of the centuries-old culture/nature dualism.

© Detail lightbox, Untitled, Giovanni Presutti, 2024

© Installation view '2275' by Giovanni Presutti, at Villa Rospigliosi, Prato, 2024

That is the failure of anthropocentrism as the primacy of sapiens over the remaining forms of life. It is revealed in the enlargements of the masks. Morbid biological scans, nature reduced to a negative, slides torn from microscopic voyeurism. Every century has its ruins and its way of putting them into images by making them landscapes, writes Daniele Del Giudice (2013). Presutti's is a warning on the dust scale of this interdependence.
Two thousand two hundred and seventy-five. The numbers, when written out, become unrecognizable. Like the masks, we didn't notice. For a while, they painted fear on our faces.

© Installation view '2275' by Giovanni Presutti, at Villa Rospigliosi, Prato, 2024