Ra di Martino - Brizia Minerva Extended text

Further reading: a text by Brizia Minerva (curator, Achivo Carmelo Bene) in connection with:

Rä di Martino: All of his steps were sentiments, all of his teeth were ideas / 23 March - 29 April 2023

Opening Wednesday 22 March 6 - 8.30 pm

Still from: Rä di Martino Là dove muore, canta (Wherever he dies, he sings) 2022 Multichannel video installation, 16 minutes (produced by Archivio Carmelo Bene)

The Infinite Nature of Selflessness.
Reflections on a Dialogue between Carmelo Bene
and Rä di Martino

by Brizia Minerva

"Memory, mother of the Muses. A thought turned back is one turned towards what must be thought, and is the terrain from which poetry springs".
- M. Heidegger

Là dove muore, canta (Where he dies, he sings) is a work arising from the immersion in the corpus of Carmelo Bene's memory through his Archive. As an archive it is - as Jacques Derrida Freudianly recalls - both foundation and detritus, memory and oblivion. A place of the immemorable or immemorial, as Carmelo Bene would say: an adjective he loved to use to express the dimension of his work, the discomfort and disturbance in the impossibility of remembering what is unforgettable of the highest and most significant acts of both art and life.

For Bene, the greatest scenic proponent of absence and non-being, “The only life that counts is the one you cannot recount. It even eludes itself. That life is your own death that rushes towards you hour by hour.” If the nature of every archive is spectral a priori, since it is "neither present nor absent, in flesh and blood, neither visible nor invisible, but a trace that always refers back to another whose gaze could not be crossed," then it is up to the artistic language to constructs a possible dialogue between being and nothingness.

This is the starting point for the work of Rä di Martino, called upon not to narrate or interpret the work of Carmelo Bene but to rewrite it, reinvent it and put it back into play.
Di Martino pursues a form of artistic research that penetrates the fabric of cultural history, investigates the images of cinema, television and the web, in continuous dialogue with the fictitious and yet pervasive world they produce, orchestrating a narrative that is both artistic and analytical. And to do so, the artist draws on varius languages and registers linked to his poetics, to the relationship between real and virtual, between time and memory. In his work, di Martino often interacts with contemporary ruins, disused and residual architecture (No More Stars [2010, 2011]; Controfigura [2017]), historical paradigms of places and people, or with protagonists and stories from the Pop imaginary (Untitled (Marilyn) [2004-2011]; Poor, Poor Jerry [2017]), capturing their estrangement and suspension.

In the exploration of Carmelo Bene's archive, the artist lets himself be guided by the interrupted or unfinished elements, sought in the many documents, in the blurs of hundreds of photographs, films and tapes, writings and stage direction, capable of evoking that spectral truth irreducible to any real explanation. It is Carmelo Bene himself who tells us that "…the past was never a is; it was never lived; its ruins are the remains of what was never present. Only if memory becomes oblivion is artifice annihilated in the fortuitous presentness of the act.” Something akin to the Notes magico, the means suggested by Freud to explain the functioning of memory through that which is removed.

Rä di Martino enters the actor’s phantasmal library, defined by him as “a ghostly vessel,” roaming the seas the seas with its crew of dead men. "[...] says Bram Stocker of the ship 'painted over a painted sea'". Over six thousand books, out of the twenty thousand he possesses, "in their inorganic restlessness, more living, but so much, than those merely alive" with whom she establishes an osmotic, mediumistic confrontation. There are no authors; there is no major or minor, but rather they are summoned to an eternal present, vampirized by Carmelo Bene who, as an obsessive reader, comment on the pages by fine-tuning his verifications. Betraying the text. Transposing everything into a minor key. Laghing at Shakespeare or Laforgue, making both enemies and friends of them. Loving Shakespeare while pretending not to love him. The issue is always the same: getting out of the way, thwarting the reading process by consuming it, making a vacuum within the creation.

Browsing through the densely marked books of Bene’s library also means tracing a complex web of intellectual references capable of bringing together the abandonment of the mystcs an Lacan in Seminar XX, on female lack and jouissance. His favourite thinker – the Schopenhauer of The World as Will and Representation; the Nietzsche of Human too Human, the Heidegger of What is Metaphysics?, on whose lines of thought his change in acting takes place, all the way to Hölderlin, to the only voice as metaphysical consolation, to the will to say nothing, to be dispensed from meaning, to arrive at the emptiness that generates the creative act and his opening up to Freud, Deleuze and Derrida, Artaud and Klossowski, Sade and von Sacher-Masoch.

Through photographic sequences, Rä di Martino stares at the pages of Bene's most popular texts, filled with notes in the margins and Post-its, and opens the, and opens the diaries with her own writings on a never-finished work on the Vampire. In this process of showing images first hand , the artist does not strive to represent things but to present them. The frontal nature of the photograph suddenly makes visible what is immanent yet which escapes view: the intimacy of a thought, the everyday life of the actor, the full operation of his intellectual process. Some covers feature fading or cigarette burns – signs of Bene’s frequent and impetuous consultation. In others, it is the yellowed Post-its that form the visual narrative, along with the underlining of the text and the notes in the margins. “Reading as non-remembering,” theorises Bene, as abandonment to the somnambulism of the actor’s machine: “in the resounding skeleton of every text, memory is exonerated from the need to be that of representative and simulative performance; reading is stage directions escapes vision: the intimacy of a thought, the everyday life of the actor, the full operation of his intellectual process. Some covers bear fading or cigarette burns, the signs of Bene's frequent and impetuous consultation. In others, it is the yellowed post-it notes that form the visual narrative, along with the underlining of the text and the notes in the margins. "Reading as non-remembrance", Bene theorises, as abandonment to the somnambulism of the actor's machine: "in the sounding skeleton of each text, memory is exempted from the need to be of the representative and simulative performance, reading is a stage directions [...] for operating in a non-temporal dimensione of memory, abandoning oneself to a past thet does not return, thet eliminates any compromise with the apparatus of memory, that returns precisely because it is not memorized but is remembered in non-remembering. To read to start again from the zero degree of remembrance by going back to that past of the present which is a sayng without a will.” Meanwhile, in the texture of the various inks have faded and discoloured-erasures and overlapping of words, deviations and exchanges-the snapshots of the handwritten pages testfy to the passing of time.

Writing experienced as an oneiric journey, working away at texts and against texts that Bene elaborates by turning them inside out, with evocations and black holes from which the existential truth of the actor emerges, offering a degree of emotional sincerity beyond the myth of his memory, and that sequence after sequence, reveals its extraordinary ordinariness.

Where he dies, he sings
Multi-channel video installation, 16 minutes

Voice Lino Musella
Music Simone Pappalardo
VFX Gianni Caratelli
Executive production Rä di Martino and Benedetta Marchiori for Cronache Marziane
Produced by the Polo Biblio-Museale di Lecce, Carmelo Bene Archive, Teatro Pubblico Pugliese

Inspired by Carmelo Bene's diaries with his notes on the vampire, Rä di Martino created the video installation Là dove muore, canta ( Wherever he dies, hi sings): a portrait of the ghost of the actor who reappears from elsewhere to open his notebooks and read through his writings.
The title is taken from a citation from Carmelo Bene to be found in the notebooks, paradigmatic not only for its musicality but also because it hinges on the theoretical framework that characterises all the work and thought of the actor, whose fundamental dichotomy is between being and representation, image and sound. The vampire thus serves as a metaphor for the condition of the actor, comparable to the restlessness of the undead. It is from his death, from his farewell to the world, therefore from the Ego, that the non-actor – thereby demonstrating his emptiness, his nothingness, only to become sound, phone - is capable of saying the inside.

Carmelo Bene's presence is offered through a 3D reconstruction of his image. The voice, modelled on that of actor Lino Musella, was subjected to a spectral analysis that identified its harmonic components, transforming the melody of the words into notes. The result is a musicality closely linked to the body of sound - a process connected with the research Carmelo Bene curried out on his own voice through sophisticated amplification and playback equipment. Using techniques linked to the language and illusory mechanisms of cinema and television, Rä di Martino performs a veritable operation of writing and editing with the intention of producing an image able to evoke presences and narratives that toy with reality and its representation.

The virtuality nature of video is used by the artist as a form of dislocation of representation, a dimension in which the figure of the great actor - in turn an acting and media machine capable of moving within in and against low-brow television output – becomes both abstract and Pop at the same time. Through a ‘minorisation’ and desecration of Carmelo Bene's work, di Martino reactivates the remnants of a imaginary that was very strong. The synchronised projection onto different monitors of image, sound and voice composes a whole in which Bene reappears in alternating rhythms, reflecting the fragmentary nature of the text. While one figure of the actor comes alive and speaks, the other waits, and the music produced by the voice is transformed into sound, creating a very particular, electronic harmony.

The figure of the actor appears immersed in the darkness of an undefined space, enveloped in a nostalgic aura. Perhaps the signs of a life gone by. Perhaps his having become something else, a digital image. The undead Carmelo Bene and the infinite nature of of selflessness.

Special thanks to the Archivio Carmelo Bene, Lecce who produced the video Lá dove muore, canta, and the original photographic series.

An artist book “Carmelo Bene. Là dove muore, canta“ edited by Humboldt books and produced by Archivio Carmelo Bene accompanies the film and research.
The book will be launched 25 February at Testo 2023, Florence

Opening Wednesday 22 March 6 - 8.30 pm

The exhibition runs 23 March, Wed - Sat, 12 - 6pm
until 29 April 2023