Only an iron skeleton remained of everything. Of the Venere degli Stracci, in the heart of Naples, there was nothing left at dawn. This is how the work of Michelangelo Pistoletto ended in ashes in less than 15 days. Who comments: “Raggedy society has taken over.” Words that somehow also evoke the context in which the gesture took place: a 32-year-old homeless man would have caused the fire, chased and arrested by the police in the afternoon. But before the breakthrough in research, many hypotheses had been chasing each other. With some certainty: there was no self-combustion, “it was an act of vandalism”, as the Councilor for Legality of the Municipality and former Quaestor of the city, Antonio De Iesu, immediately stated. In the heat, someone accuses a gang of children, while the Pistoletto Foundation talks about a race that, on social networks, would have invited people to burn Venus. Mayor Gaetano Manfredi was already there shortly after 9, surrounded by several councilors. He said that he was surprised by what happened. But he made one thing clear from the beginning: “Naples will react and Venus will be renewed.” Pistoletto, who created that Venus, acknowledges that when he learned of the fire, his first reaction “was a strong control of emotion, because reason must always win.” However, what happened remains. They all condemn. Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano says that he is sorry, being an “admirer of the artist Pistoletto” and Governor De Luca calls for “greater rigor against acts of vandalism, abuse and defacement, which target cultural and artistic property”. citizens and tourists put down flowers and notes: “May a better city be reborn from your ashes”, is written on one. Almost the same words of Bishop Don Mimmo Battaglia, who hopes it will be “a new sense of co-responsibility to preserve, spread, promote beauty and art.” But Napoli, for their part, picks up another blow. Some tourists look on in disbelief at what happened. Some Neapolitans run to hide and say: “But now let’s not condemn the whole city.” Manfredi tries to go further, aware of the seriousness of the gesture.
In piazza Municipio in Naples the Venus of rags
“It should not surprise us because if we look at the history of our humanity there has always been a continuous clash between beauty, progress and what is violence and regression, but in the end progress, beauty, civilization.” It is a process “that cannot be stopped, neither with vandalism nor with violence.” For this reason, according to Pistoletto, it was decided to redo the opera: “We will launch a fundraiser -announced the mayor- so that this reconstruction can also be done with popular participation because Naples is beauty”. And to those who ask him why there were no protection systems, he answers: “I don’t believe in a supervised society, I believe in social surveillance.” However, it was thanks to the images from the city’s video surveillance system that the Police – the agents of the Flying Squad and those of the Decumani Commissioner – managed to identify and block the alleged perpetrator. He is a clochard, a 32-year-old Neapolitan vagabond. A drifter with some police record, but not specific. The man was located in a canteen in via Marina and arrested: the charges against him by the prosecutor are arson and destruction of cultural property. And so, even at its end, as at its origin, Pistoletto’s Venus combined beauty and decadence. Two elements, says the teacher a few hours after the fire, when all the hypotheses were still valid, that “come together to regenerate society, to represent the regeneration of these rags, of this rubble that we are creating.” Although in the end, in this case, “ragged society sadly took over: it’s like a self-combustion of the worst side of humanity.”
Pistoletto: “Raggedy society has taken over”
Michelangelo Pistoletto admits that the first reaction, when he learned that his Venere degli Stracci, in Naples, had been destroyed by fire “was a strong control of emotion, because reason must always win.” “But on the other hand, emotion and reason always exist and are a duality that must find an agreement, a balance, a harmony”, he adds. He then admits, “This raggedy society has sadly taken over, it’s like a self-combustion of the worst side of humanity.”
laws the interview in Pistoletto post covid in 2020
