Il ballo degli sconosciuti (The dance of unknown people)

script by Diego Reghellin

The twofold communicative force of a poetics based on fragments, on one hand denotes an incapacity for an omni-understanding glance, on the other reveals itself as the way to reconstruct the reality denied to all appearance, giving up this way a nihilism that refuses life as unknowable.

The stall of the unspeakable has been defeated by bringing back the art to its duty of sense generatrix. The artist does not describe, he creates. The in fieri grammar of "The Dance of Unknown People" is written in a language where both formal and symbolic values release a universe that was thought as being known. The key to approach it is basically the negative of the sentence through which Proust, in Search of lost time, describes his refusal of a writer he loved in his youth: “Every thing could have been easily seen in it, has it if not always been seen, at least as it was usually seen”.

The occasional epiphany, from which these photos come from, has been dressed again of somegenial expressive overbearance by inserting the temporal dimension in a technical and conceptual way.

Photograms where the present leaves the way to a co-presence of before and after, cards ready for a film mosaic where the vital becoming is so undeniable that it can demiurgically be manipulated with and in new dimensions, beyond time itself, this without losing its intimate necessity.

Before taking part to the dance organised by Bettale the unknown people run backwards the contemporary Lethe that made philosophers and sociologists discuss about non-places.

Individualities do not disappear, but the dry container in which they live do, sephulcral boulder cemented by looks that do not see, footsteps that do not walk.

It does not concern the loss of individuality but it concerns a zero-degree provided to those who will find behind the artwork a clear invitation to acknowledge theirselves as part of the dance.

As in a baroque suite where the bonding agent that keeps together the various moments is the tone so in “The Dance of Unknown People” every single artwork finds its first unit in a chromatic homogeneity, prelude to deeper and never definitive hermeneutic adventures.

The compositive aspect is in fact clear in its developing, with a prevalence of the horizontal movement in the triptychs and of the vertical one in the six-fragment series. However the totality of the secret textual correspondences escapes pre-established laws. The predominance of the aestethical dimension does not refuse the most current conceptualism, it overtakes it however in a

direction that has the courage of its own language, of a world in which the artist is not an obscure bard, but a loving creator, enraptured mirror of brotherhood.

This fragments I have shored against my ruins” wrote Eliot at the end of his Waste Land.

Today, a century after that, we can now find in the fragments by Bettale the flowers born on the same land, though wet by those colourful tears that have finally cancelled the words happiness and knowledge, substituted by possibility of love.

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