Maintenant #65: Marco Giovenale
The texts and signs are usually born & woven at the same time with some complicated story or notes I actually write then overwrite, just like superimposed strata of meaning (or safe exits from any fixed meaning). Sometimes the lines and fragments I (dra)write deal with trivial events, sometimes they are long essays I writerase. (Since, you know, to write two or more times on the same line is kind of erasure). In other occasions I do prefer a “capital letters” form of writing. Or: I make up series of glyphs standing in some kind of in-between spaces: not alien alphabets nor human ones… the exploration of the territories of the asemic, the meaningless, the forgotten, the “twisted” and unusual, simpy must go on, also for political reasons. One of the aims I have, as a visual artist and as a writer and drawriter, consists in showing the growing of the roots of power just inside of language itself.
In the 65th in the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Italian poet Marco Giovenale.
Eight Poems
The literate and artistic world has always been something falling out of rigid borders and definitions, but the positive growth in schooling in the West and the spreading of that strange kind of mirrored collective conscience/unconscious known as the world wide web, make the situation more and more undecipherable. That said, I partly agree: yes, in Europe and elsewhere there’s a lot of writers who are also musicians, architects who make poetry, composers who install electronically painted ‘objects’, street artists and asemic writers who are also in the mood for making old fashioned “oil on canvas” abstract paintings. But: this does not map anything; and doesn’t tell us how the things are going on, on a global scale. This is because any really “global” scale absolutely cannot be seen by individuals or even by large groups of critics. I can imagine large teams are working on some history of the arts in the 21st century, but they won’t catch the whole, nor even a significant part of it, since the world itself as a collective mind started making art, abruptly, as a whole net, as a neural series of connected individuals, millions of ones.
By Marco Giovenale.
Double Take
The uncertainty over the message, the lack of explanation or answer, is the impetus for the rest of the novel. The narrator draws the same sort of portrait of his friend as the narrator draws of himself in Autoportrait. Details come piecemeal, thought processes shift tangentially from one memory to another. It’s a love-story of sorts, the deep immersion in the story of the narrator’s friend is an expression of closeness and a willingness to understand. This is acknowledged in the narrative: “To love someone from the moment of their death: is that friendship?”
Colin Herd reviews Édouard Lev é‘s Suicide.