Interview with Fabio Mauri

Hans Ulrich Obrist

On the occasion of the exhibition ‘La Ville, le Jardin, la Mèmoire’.

Accademia di Francia, Villa Medici, Rome, May 1999.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Do you have five minutes to do an interview?

Fabio Mauri: Yes, of course.

HUO: Can you tell me a little bit about the space?

FM: When looking for the space here in Villa Medici, I found out that it was here that Roberto Bompiani, my great-grandfather, had his studio. I used to see it from the street when my mother and I went up the Muro Torto and she would say, 'That's Grandpa Roberto's studio’. So since the theme of the exhibition was memory, I researched the memory of this grandfather who was a painter. He also had a son and a brother who were painters, but he was the best known: he and Battaglia, his cousin, are in the National Gallery of Modern Art. So I found the studio again and I tried to reconstruct this memory, making a genealogical journey, which I’d never dealt with before in my life.

I found that these people in my family, of whom there are many portraits, were elegant, witty people, some of whom lived very tragic lives: some committed suicide, some died in the war, but on the whole they were lucky people, rich, elegant, brilliant, very witty and very sensitive. These portraits, it's hard to describe in an interview, gave me a strong sense of nonexistence: in front of these very accomplished, elegant lives, in front of these portraits that expose, give testimony, I felt timed, metered. This life is absolutely relative, which, yes, I know, but it's one thing to know things, and it's another thing to perceive them as feeling. So I reconstructed this great-grandfather of mine, the paintings I could find and also a family I didn't know.

HUO: Through research?

FM: Yes, through research I learned that thirty other relatives of mine live in Rome that I’ve have never seen in so many years of life. It was very interesting.

I made this room by adding another element, which is a sofa that had belonged to my grandmother, that is, Roberto Bompiani's daughter-in-law, who was the wife of General Giorgio Bompiani, represented here in two versions: as a child and as an adult. The sofa became my mother's, then my sister's and then mine. I’ve tried to reconstruct all the people who sat on it: from Gabriele Dannunzio – because my maternal grandfather was the impresario of Dannunzio's play The Daughter of Iorio – and from there on many more, whose names are marked on a plaque above the sofa. These are people I saw when only a few years old, such as, for example, Luigi Pirandello, Alberto Savinio, Filippo De Pisis...

HUO: Whom you met?

FM: Yes of course. I was little, but my father was Luigi Pirandello's secretary and so he used to come to our house to discuss the problems of his contracts. I remember him with the actor Pitoëff who was working in Paris. I must have been twelve, but I remember him well – I was a very precocious child. And then little by little the others: Ettore Petrolini, who was a very good friend of my mother, Elio Vittorini, Guido Piovene... My uncle was a publisher, I worked with him for many years, and many well-known Italian authors sat on this couch, who were also my friends: Alberto Moravia, Ennio Flaiano, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg etc. And then having inherited this sofa myself, there were all the great American painters we sat with when they came to Rome in the 1960s: Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, Conrad Marca-Relli, Andy Warhol...

HUO: Were these friends of yours or friends of your parents?

FM: No, mine, not my parents'. They were in Milan, while I moved to Rome, which was the place of my family’s origin. Roberto and all the relatives I found lived in Via Condotti and Via Belsiana. They were born in Via Belsiana, as I say in the sentence that runs along the wall. Here, then, on this kind of monumental plaque, are all the names of those whom I remembered who came to my house, but every now and then I think of others I forgot and they were important... if not my friends, my guests. There you are too!

HUO: When we came to your house, you told us about many things related to memory and also about a magazine you made with Pasolini. Could you tell me about this magazine?

FM: Yes. In my curious precociousness, following the work of my father, who was a book distributor and publisher with Mondadori, we were in Bologna and I met Pier Paolo Pasolini who was three or four years older than me.

HUO: What year was this?

FM: This was in 1937/38, and he immediately made a very great friendship with me and with my family, which was a very open family with a strong intellectual orientation. We founded a magazine called Il Setaccio [The Sieve], in which many people participated who later fulfilled their vocation as poets: there was Decio Cinti, older than us and a former secretary of Marinetti, there was the poet Francesco Leonetti, the poet Roberto Roversi, Giovanna Bemporad, who is still alive (like Leonetti, like Roversi) and who had already started the translation – along with Hölderlin – of The Odyssey, which was published last year and who remained a dear, dear, friend of mine and was also a very good friend of Pier Paolo, a very good poetess, and several others.

With Pier Paolo it was a very intense friendship, through all his vicissitudes, like the death of his younger brother in the war. Years later we met again in Rome, where he had moved and so had I. Our affection, which lasted until his death (we visited each other intensely) had a moment of cooling because I clearly belonged to what can be called a Roman neo-dada avant-garde, towards which he had a lot of distrust: he belonged to a group of organic intellectuals or of socialist realists, as it was called then, who were very Marxist while we were a bit dandy, for ideological reasons, and he considered us too bourgeois. He would say, ‘The avant-garde is the daughter of the bourgeoisie’, and I would say, ‘Yes, that's true, but there's no point in me pretending to be non-bourgeois. This is my culture.’

In the last years he used to invite me to be in his films, I don't know why. In one, Medea, with Maria Callas, there’s a certain King Gideon, who was me! He even invited me to be in The Gospel According to St Matthew, but I was wary of a Gospel made by Pasolini. After seeing it, I found that it was an extremely intelligent and spiritual work and I told him so. So I made Medea because of that. I said yes to a film of his, and in reciprocation he did a performance of mine called Intellectual at the Museum of Bologna (1975), in which I projected his Gospel According to Matthew on his shirt: I was giving the responsibility of a work back to its author. He was supposed to do a kind of tour with me two months later, but in the meantime he was killed, so I did this performance, which has travelled halfway around the world, on his shirt and his jacket. Curiously enough, every time, it’s stolen, although it’s not his authentic shirt, nor his authentic jacket, and every time, in one or another museum, someone takes it. Pier Paolo for me was like the Le Grand Meaulnes, a great friend and a master. He had this sweet and deep attitude in all the relationships he cared about.

HUO: And you made the magazine until when?

FM: We did the magazine from 1938, at the beginning of the war, to 1940, so for two or three years. The issues are almost unobtainable.

HUO: And it was never republished?

FM: No, it was never republished, but two historical books were published about the magazine, which makes me smile a little bit because, I was a kid. I was fourteen years old.

HUO: What are they called?

FM: The magazine? Il Setaccio, it's two publications about the youths from Il Setaccio. There’s also an American and English study on the group of us in Bologna who made the magazine, because, curiously enough, the youngest of us, almost taking the Bologna group as a model, later created a very important group intellectually in Italy, which was the group of il Mulino, the Bologna publishing house. It was related to publishing, to study, with a Catholic and Marxist tendency, very much related to the University. This publishing house still exists and, as I say, was made by the younger siblings of this first Bologna group led by Pasolini, Giovanna Bemporad, myself, my sister Silvana – who later married Ottiero Ottieri, the writer – and Leonetti, Roversi, Ardigò – in short, all people who are still alive, thank God, who still have a great university presence.

[almost concluding…]

HUO: Thank you.

FM: Nothing, thank you.

HUO: There was another, actually two or three other issues ... do you have time? we can also do it later ...

FM: Yes, I have time, lots of time, I'm waiting for the other paintings ...

HUO: We can otherwise make a stop...

FM: But I didn't realize there was also video, a wonderful thing that machine, I thought you only record...

HUO: No...

FM: Aaah! [touches his head as if combing his hair a little].

HUO: The other thing was related to cinema. ou talk about Pasolini, and last time, when we met at your house, you showed us all these works that were not only projections on screen, but also projections on bodies, projections on houses. Could you tell me about the genesis of this idea of using projections in a different way? Because in the 1990s, so many artists took up this idea of projection. It's very interesting, your pioneering work on this.

FM: Well, for me – in addition to the tendency towards artificial production rather than natural produbtion, in which commodities, fashion re-represented itself to man – for me, the sixties, the beginning of the consumer society, was represented by the screen, just as if it were an ancient frescoed wall. In the screen and in a cinema, an ancient ritual was repeated: people gathered, instead of attending a mass, to watch a projection in the dark. Individually, each person followed the plot of an author making a moral parable. As Huizinga says, cinema leads the viewer back to an elementary condition that always needs a moral structure to explain the story, otherwise it becomes an incomprehensible phenomenology. The screen seemed to me to be this sign that summed up the time, a screen in which I was led to write ‘The End’, not so much as a foreshadowing of death, but as a visual and conceptual element that encompassed destiny: not only the possibility of recording the stories and events of the world, but also their conclusion, precisely, as a film does. The physical screen was like a picture, so the disappearance of the picture implied that the bottom of the representation of the world was the screen. In a sense, I also turned the system upside down because little by little I felt the need to project films, historical films – Dreyer, rather than Fritz Lang, etc. according to content choices – onto objects, onto things, onto people. Through a gradual process I understood that the relationship between projection and screen is an analogy of the relationship between mind and world, projection and world: we look at the world, always projecting our own cultural traces, and in the bounce between a total subjectivity and the plastic objectivity of things in the world and events, there is without a doubt, the linguistic birth of new symbologies. If I project onto a woman running, what is born is a third meaning. So I projected on all the things that I could imagine projecting on. In fact, I have a long list of projections that I didn't do, but that I see that young painters, currently, a few years later, are doing.

HUO: When did these projections onto bodies start?

FM: They started in 1972, and then I intensified them with exhibitions where the projections were indoors, outdoors, on a billiard ball, on a fifty-litre milk container, on a fan in motion etc. Then, I did a lot of them in Canada, in Toronto and Vancouver. It looked like an extremely attractive or spectacular performance, but almost non-communicative. To me, I was making a kind of demonstration of the birth of language, but it took the critics a long time to understand what I was doing.

HUO: At some point there were architectural interventions, right?

FM: On the facades of houses. Projecting on a house, projecting on a monument is really invention in the literal sense, that is, the finding of a new meaning. This I did for many years. It was taken up years later by MOCA's ‘Art and Film’ exhibition, when they saw a few photographs of these events and they invited me to the exhibition.

HUO: What work did they show?

FM: I showed the projection of Pasolini’s Gospel on his shirt, then the projection on fifty litres of milk, the projection of Pabst's In the West Nothing New on the fan in motion, then there was Dreyer's Gertrud projected on the plate of a scale, a bit old, where the scale marks a weight to signify that the intellectual product is a thing, like a boulder; it's not a word in the wind, it's a material corporeality. I had five screenings; we wanted to do more but all this is always very expensive and tiring because so far I’ve never used video: it's always Super-8 films. Making them last for the long time of an exhibition is always very laborious: you need a person to reload them, there’s nothing automatic. So far, I’ve used this artisanal aspect, with a taste of the ancient experiment, as I did them the first time, when VHS didn’t even exist. I’ve also done these projections on other people: on director Miklós Jancsó I projected his film The Desperate, I think, or some other film, and he did it very willingly in the big performance-exhibition that was called ‘Obscuramento’ in Rome in 1975.

HUO: In your screens from the 1950s, and in these projections that take place in space, there’s always the aspect of time, which seems so important. Could you talk about this condition of time?

FM: Yes, very willingly. I'm discovering it now, after a long time, due to a curious occasion: I was invited to a small exhibition called ‘The Place of Places’. Not a big exhibition, but in a nice place. I didn't have time because I was preparing this exhibition at Villa Medici and I said I had no idea what I could do. But the place was nice because it was the National Cartography [Museum?] – so all these maps of the world – but very small, organised with few means. So I gave them a clock and they had to choose: either a clock that marks time down or a pendulum that you can hear beating seconds, but it has no hand. Because the place of places, for me, is time. I actually feel this strongly; I feel very much that we are, avant-garde or not, children of time; we speak a language and manoeuvre concepts of time. It's almost impossible to think how a man of the year 3000 will think. We have to process, to open gaps in a thought that’s alive but tends to consolidate each time, tends to become crystal clear each time. So time, I realised lately, has been a constant. I used to call it by other names: I used to call it ‘actuality’, ‘epochality’, and instead it was just this time, in which I was drawn to live. And in fact, even in this exhibition there’s time, and in my opinion, making poetry, that is, making art – to which I have dedicated my life – is always to give a response to this place-time in which one is destined to live.

For example, in one show, I was invited to do a happening on Italian black-and-white television. I didn't do a repeat of a performance that had already been done; I tried to do a performance for the national television medium. It was a very heavy moment in Italian political life; there was nothing dramatic about it, but it was politically very heavy. It was 1972, and so, taking this opportunity, I asked if I could have a minute of blank screen.

HUO: This was for RAI, no?

FM: Yes, for RAI, the national RAI. It was Channel Two – there were only two channels. Under this screen, this interruption of the image, which became in my eyes the image itself, I would cry; I would utter a lament that could be extended to the whole world, to my existential condition or to the moment. Starting with a classical beginning, with the titles and my name and an ending: ‘The End’, which was already there in my paintings. Lately, thanks to you, Hans, I’m very grateful, this film has been dusted off like an ancient corpse. You saw it in my monograph of the exhibition done at the National Gallery of Modern Art and prompted me to research this tape, which was shown in your ‘Archipelag TV’ exhibition, hopefully with success! I received the tapes and I found it very nice: it was longer in its original, because it was really an obsessive thing, but people were phoning up, saying, ‘There's someone crying on TV!’

HUO:Yes, there were some very interesting reactions, Hundreds of people called.

FM: It gave me great pleasure and I also found very beautiful the way you displayed it next to Boltanski's photograph of a Jewish girl. It moved me, and to be moved again by one's ancient works is very rare. I thank you very much.

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