2017
According to R. Esposito in “Immunitas”, the word comunità (community, in English, n.d.t.) has an early opposite meaning if compared to the common concepts of belonging or propriety. The word and its original meaning, indeed, derive from cum-munus, where munus is different from the generic donum, as it signifies the given present, and not the one that is received.
R. Esposito writes: “ Therefore the members of a community are mutually bound to a duty of reciprocal gift, to a giving duty, that commits them to literally lean out of themselves, to literally expose themselves, to address the other, almost dispossessing themselves in favour of the other”.
So Altofest activates a concrete “founding” invasion, according to which the invaded opens the door to the invasor offering as a gift his own identity with the clear intention of dissolving it. A new transversal community is originated, thanks to the “barbaric” power of art. For the “space donor” citizen, it is not only a matter of hosting an artist in his/her own house. It is a matter of lowering the defences, letting the space and its inhabitants contaminated by the linguistic infection. This invasion/infection is the origin and the ending of the community, in its continuous going to be.
Photo by Vicky Solli, drawings by Ilaria Garzillo
Video teaser Giuseppe Valentino