The Performance Day

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“The Performance Day” consists of a competition during which each participating artist challenges the others by performing for no more then one minute. Every kind of performance is allowed.The audience votes immediately after each challenge until a winner is proclaimed. There is a presenter on the stage. Sometimes, on the stage, there are also Emilio Fantin himself and a musician who plays live music.

Each edition of “The Performance Day” is different, according to the location where it takes place, the participants and the way how the event takes form. “The Performance Day” is mostly the result of a three or four day long  laboratory (called Experience). In other cases no laboratory is scheduled, but there is only a simply sort of flash mob in which any kind of people can freely take part.

Actually during the Experience the participants state their ideas and start to work on them with the support of the tutor and of other competitors. They all contribute to the event, taking care of the final result for what regards both spectacular and quality aspects. During the workshop they put in common their points of view and discuss them but at the final game they have to show their individual talent and try to be the winner. The functional and spectacular aspect of the audience represents one of  the key elements of the project. The winner is confirmed by the acclamation of the audience. 

                          An article about "The Performance Day"

In 2004 a group of residence international artists played “The most beautiful way to get into the water”, on the clear sea of Dubrownich.Audience: walking by people

                             Art at War

When performance breaks through the spiderweb

G udr u n  D e C h i r ico

The spider’s promise

True, we only live once, but unless refuted we also die only once. Yes, but how? Sometimes you can hardly utter a wordbefore you find yourself bundled up at your own funeral; at other times, if you are lucky, death will grant you a sortof reprieve. Call them deferrals if you will, but then you find you can request your last cigarette, your last phone call,or write your last will. You can leave posterity just the inheritance of some fitting and stern warning, right at the lastmoment. Like Uncle Ben’s: “With great power comes great responsibility.” If you don’t remember who he is, you willcertainly know his grandson, Peter Parker — someone who, without that legacy, would never have caught a fly. But juststick that inheritance of words into his ear and you get Spider-Man. But then of course, that’s how superheroes areborn: they see good and evil and accept the battle. And it is only through this duel that the conflict manages to be ascontemporary as a television quiz and as ancient as a page from Homer.

The rules of the game. 

Also the artist’s performance is born and dies at the same time. Emilio Fantin is quite intransigent on this point. It


must last one minute, the same brief duration of the silence held to commemorate the dead, or that of a televisioncommercial. Than the gong will sound or the whistles blow and it’s game over! A single judge: the audience. A singlevote: a show of hands. The winner takes all and moves on. Quarterfinals, semi-finals, finals. 

The art of the umpire

And if one clashes with another, where is the third? The third is the umpire, the third is Fantin. And for once the umpire


is the inventor and entertainer of the match. But who is Emilio Fantin? 55 years old, born in Bassano del Grappa,at the Venice Biennale in 1993, his research has led to operations on logic, the fundamentals of mathematics, andinorganic chemistry. Weaving his way through the processes of international awards and calls for applicants, Fantinhere invents an original format, in which the contestants are artists like himself. In pursuit of victory, they accept to dobattle with each other in a performance tournament, clashing face-to-face with no one between them.

Total contest

After all, everything works this way. From micro to macro, with those who brag that life is a contest, and thosewho dream of never land. But even if you carry out a survey, the fact is that you realise you’re already in the race,and you’ve already taken sides, prey as you are to that compulsive anxiety that always makes us think in terms ofmajority/minority and winners/losers. An obsessive menu for contemporary tastes, with challenge upon challenge,all ready for a television vote from home: press buttons, call a free phone number, or raise your scorecard, withexpert juries or popular audiences. And everywhere an eagerness to compete. Leaving aside the more commoncontests, there are clashes between robots and humans, as in Seattle, between pastry makers in Lyon, dancerson wheelchairs in Belarus, cocktails in Warsaw, water-buffalo-mozzarella eaters in Paestum, artistic moustachesand beards in Brighton, or paper darts in Salzburg. A whole fornication of contests, or rather of performanceswithin performances, since there are no longer any self-respecting performances that are not referred to as such.
 
Everywhere you look it’s a performance here, performance there.

     

Performance society

In military terms, show business has never allowed artistic performance to remain simply as an external virus buthas always wanted to incorporate it in its omnivorous language. Everything is mixed up, but it’s in this constantzapping that we find a paroxysmal recoil. Since television has sucked in the world of performance, the time hascome for performance to respond: why not use the screen of a quiz or a reality show and officiate an authenticperformance game-show?

So be it: a performance contest!

Ten in the evening, 4 October 2008. The first rehearsal. The hall of MAMbo-Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bolognadirected by Gianfranco Maraniello is the venue for “SP569”, the third event in the “Strade BluArte” project, which ispromoted by the provincial cultural commission. It is organised by Dede Auregli and curated by Chiara Pilati. As thepatron of the event, Fantin is up on the stage wearing a Colombo-style trench coat, together with Emilio Pieraccioniholding his presenter’s folder. The artists are 0100101110101101.ORG, Riccardo Benassi, Muna Mussie, ArtaNgucaj and Arben Beqiraj, Stefano Pasquini, Sabrina Torelli, Giulia Zuanni and Italo Zuffi. The names of thecontenders are drawn from two hats to establish the programme of contests, yet everything takes place on a singlestage. The same stage where Muna Mussie can be seen arriving with gracefully gazelle-like bounds.Immobilised like a smiling Nefertiti with her eyes lowered, she holds a gymnastics rope as the countdown in thebackground forms a medley of voices on the history of Italy, from the erudite Guicciardini to the pop screams of“champions of the world!” from the sport commentator Caressa. A musical leap and we are submerged by anavalanche of Alpine choruses accompanying an image of Stefano Pasquini with his mask, a tambourine under hisarm and a freshly baked baguette in place of a baton. But this is only until Riccardo Benassi skips in, sweepingeverything aside with his vocalising rap, with its dizzying repetition from a magical-technological portable box thatrecords and reverberates the echoes of sounds produced. The result? Gong, gong, gong. And triumph is his. EmilioFantin offers his thanks and takes his leave, saying “it’s really great being in a museum”. 

Home sweet home.

The music changes when experience jumps down from the stage with a whole auditorium at its feet. This is the second rehearsal. Again in Bologna. It’s 6.30 p.m. on 28 November 2008. We are in an apartment at Nosadella.due, the artist residency run by Elisa Del Prete. Fantin gives an introduction, talking about home and family ritual. They’re off. First round: Cristian Chironi versus Marco Di Giovanni. The former calls his action Peter Parker, and the latter The Third Part’s the Best. Time limit: 60 seconds.

Public marathon.

The voters immediately turn into wandering spectators. From one room to the next, they form a procession, right to the end of the corridor that leads into a double bedroom. They go in quietly, and most stand up against the walls, though others sit at the edges, leaving the bed in the centre of the room free. With no sheets, and a comic book open. Like a lookout, there is none other than Spider-Man crouching on top of the cupboard. And this is Cristian Chironi, wrapped up in a Spider-Man suit, in the prehensile position of a bird, ready to leap. And thus the minute ticks by, simply observing those observing you, with a disorientating optical-comic-book difference in height. The whistle blows and it’s Marco Di Giovanni’s turn. He’s sitting in the corridor, hooded in a turquoise sweatshirt, slumped lifelessly on an old chest of drawers with antique books and stereo speakers that spit out laughter mixed with chirping. This is the “musical” soundtrack that fills the air, leaving the artist’s body in a sculptural immobility that recalls Maurizio Cattelan’s child-nailed-to-the-school-desk (Charlie Don’t Surf, 1997). The whistle blows again. And voting starts again: hands up for one or for the other? Spider-Man comes out top.

Gas, canaries, and closed circuits.

The show must go on. Margherita Moscardin looms up, her show in the darkness of the theatre illuminated by two large light bulbs dangling from her arms stretched out to form a cross. It is a clash between sight vs smell, because her antagonist, James Luciani, drags us into the neon lights of a kitchen and, for a minute, turns on the gas burners and goes and sits in thefront row. The fumes are choking, and the time has come for intrepid superheroes. Hardly surprisingly, Moscardin’s everyday romanticism is quickly swept aside, just as Luca Vanello’s canary in a cage comes to a swift end: for a minute the door of the cage is removed but the bird makes no escape, preferring to stay there in the hardly epic tranquillity of captivity. Unlike what we see in the performance in episodes by Clio Casadei, as a woman escaping towards us: first she warns us of her delay, leaving us in the room with the phone ringing, then she gives her name on the video intercom and, lastly, she hunts us down from behind, filming us together with herself and involving us in a single closed-circuit destiny. She is like us, and we are like her, in a meeting of empathy that comes only at the very end. And who could be waiting for her? A single, solitary figure...

 Spider victory

“Elementary, my dear Watson”, as Sherlock Holmes would say. It’s Spider-Man-Chironi. We had left him on a cupboard and now we suddenly find him on the balcony of the building opposite talking to his neighbour. The effect is shattering. People throng to the windows, laugh out loud and vote in unison, sending him to the finals. Here too, the coup de théâtre is a shortcircuit interplay of mirrors that duplicate again and again. This time our hero reappears in an armchair in a small room, as his own super-fan, since he is watching a cartoon of one of his adventures on television, surrounded by spider glue, spiderspies, and web-throwers. We could say this is “superhero narcissism” — the biochemistry student who becomes a superhero and only then turns from a superhero into a student to watch his own exploits. All packed into no more than three minutes.For once at least, it may be that the power of the imagination overlaps the responsibility of impact, and thus it is that even old Uncle Ben can sleep his sweet sleep.

Free lunch in the end

Don’t you get it? Chironi wins, and there’s no free lunch for spiders.

Just glory

In the 1980s you could win a Peugeot 205, but times have changed. Here there are no prizes to be won.

L’arte a duello

G udr u n D e C h i r ico

Quando la performance rompe la ragnatela  

La promessa del ragno

D’accordo, si vive una volta sola, ma fino a prova contraria si muore anche una volta sola. Sì, ma come? A volte non hai nemmeno il tempo di spiaccicare verbo che ti ritrovi impacchettato al tuo funerale; altre volte, con un po’ più di fortuna, la morte ti concede quella sorta di tempo supplementare. Tu chiamale, se vuoi, dilazioni, e allora ecco che puoi chiedere un’ultima sigaretta, un’ultima telefonata o buttar giù le tue volontà testamentarie e lasciare ai posteri giusto l’eredità di un bel monito in extremis. Come quello dello zio Ben: “Da un grande potere derivano grandi responsabilità”. Se non vi ricordate chi sia, di sicuro conoscete il nipote, Peter Parker, uno che senzaquell’eredità non avrebbe cavato un ragno da un buco. E invece, basta infilargli nell’orecchio quel lascito di vocaboli e quello ci diventa Spider-Man. D’altronde, nascono così i supereroi, vedono il bene e il male e ne accettano il duello. E solo attraverso il duello diretto lo scontro riesce a essere contemporaneo come un quiz televisivo e antico come una pagina di Omero.  

Le regole del gioco

Anche la performance d’artista nasce e muore in uno stesso tempo. Emilio Fantin, su questo, è inflessibile. Deve durare un minuto, la stessa sintetica durata di un silenzio da lutto commemorativo o di uno spot pubblicitario. Poi, al suono di gong o fischietti, game over! Unico giudice: il pubblico in sala. La votazione: un’alzata di mano collettiva. Chi dalla conta esce fuori vincente va avanti. Quarti di finale, semifinale, finale. 

L’arte dell’arbitro

E se uno si scontra con l’altro, il terzo dove sta? Il terzo è l’arbitro, il terzo è Fantin. E per una volta l’arbitro è l’inventore-intrattenitore dell’incontro. Ma chi è Emilio Fantin? 55 anni, di Bassano del Grappa, alla Biennale di Venezia nel ’93, da anni la sua ricerca addenta operazioni di logica, fondamenti della matematica, chimica inorganica. Dribblando la prassi di bandi e premi internazionali della performance, Fantin s’inventa qui un format inedito, dove i contendenti alla vittoria sono artisti come lui che accettano di sfidarsi in un torneo di performance scontrandosi in un faccia a faccia senza intermediazioni. 

Tutto un gareggiare

Del resto, tutto gira così. Dal micro al macro, con chi sbandiera che la vita è una gara e chi sogna l’isola che non c’è. Fatto sta che, se anche provi a fare un sondaggio, t’accorgi che stai già facendo una gara, diventando inevitabilmente di parte, preda di quella smania compulsiva che ci fa ragionare sempre in termini di maggioranza/minoranza e vincitori/perdenti. Menu ossessivo per palati contemporanei, sfide su sfide, attrezzate di televoto da casa, premi pulsanti e numeri verdi o alzata di palette numeriche, tanto di giurie d’esperti o platee popolari. Ovunque, ansia da competizione. Saltando quelle più comuni, ci sono le gare tra robot ed esseri umani come a Seattle, tra pasticceri a Lione, di danzatori su sedia a rotelle in Bielorussia, di cocktail a Varsavia, di mangiatori di mozzarelle di bufala a Paestum, di baffi e barba d’autore a Brighton o degli aeroplanini di carta volanti a Salisburgo. Un fornicare di gare, o meglio, di performance in performance, visto che ormai non c’è prestazione che si rispetti che non venga chiamata con questo appellativo. In tutti gli angoli, performance di qua, performance di là. 

La società della performance

Detta in soldoni, la società dello spettacolo non ha tollerato che la performance artistica rimanesse un virus esterno ma ha voluto inglobarlo nella sua grammatica onnivora. Tutto si mischia, ma è proprio in questo zapping che si può trovare un rinculo parossistico. Se la televisione ha succhiato dal mondo delle performance, è arrivato il momento che le performance rispondano: perché non usare lo stesso schema di un quiz o di un reality officiando un vero e proprio game-show performativo? 

E sia: gara di performance!

10 di sera, 4 ottobre 2008. È la prima prova. Il salone del MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna diretto da Gianfranco Maraniello accoglie l’evento “SP569”, terzo appuntamento del progetto “Strade BluArte”, promosso dall’Assessorato alla Cultura della Provincia. L’organizzazione è di Dede Auregli, la curatela di Chiara Pilati. Patron dell’evento, Fantin è lì on stage, con un trench da tenente Colombo, accanto a Emilio Pieraccioni e alla sua carpetta da presentatore. Gli artisti presenti: 0100101110101101.ORG, Riccardo Benassi, Muna Mussie, Arta Ngucaj e Arben Beqiraj, Stefano Pasquini, Sabrina Torelli, Giulia Zuanni e Italo Zuffi. Da due cappelli si pescano a sorte i nomi dei contendenti, determinando il calendario degli scontri, ma tutto purché si svolga su un unico palco. Lo stesso palco che vede salire il passo da gazzella di Muna Mussie. Immobilizzata come una sorridente Nefertite dagli occhi bassi, tiene in mano una corda ginnica, mentre il conto alla rovescia sullo sfondo intreccia un blob di voci sulla storia d’Italia, dal “colto” Guicciardini all’urlo pop “campioni del mondo” del telecronista Caressa. Un salto musicale ed ecco una valanga di cori alpini a scortare l’immagine di Stefano Pasquini con tanto di maschera, tamburello sottobraccio e una baguette fresca di giornata al posto della bacchetta. Questo finché non arriva il saltellante Riccardo Benassi, che spazza via tutto col suo rap di vocalizzi sonori messo in vertigine ripetitiva da un box portatile magico-tecnologico che registra e riverbera l’eco dei suoni appena prodotti. Risultato? Gong, gong, gong. È lui a trionfare. Emilio Fantin ringrazia e si congeda con un “è veramente bello stare dentro a un museo”. 

Casa dolce casa

Tutt’altra musica quando l’esperienza salta giù dal palco per avere un’intera casa a disposizione. Siamo alla seconda prova. Sempre a Bologna. Sono le 18.30 del 28 novembre 2008. Ci troviamo nell’appartamento di Nosadella.due, la residenza d’artista gestita da Elisa Del Prete. Fantin introduce il tutto parlando di rito domestico e familiare. Si parte. Primo giro: Cristian Chironi contro Marco Di Giovanni. Il primo va a chiamare la sua azione Peter Parker, il secondo La terza parte è la migliore. Scadenza: 60 secondi, determinata dal suono acuto di un fischietto. 

Pubblico maratoneta

Immediatamente tutti i votanti si trasformano in spettatori itineranti. Da una stanza all’altra, in processione, fino in fondo a un corridoio che porta in una camera matrimoniale. Tutti entrano zitti, i più si appoggiano in piedi alle pareti, altri si siedono ai bordi, lasciando libero il centro della stanza occupato dal letto. Sulle lenzuola, un fumetto aperto.

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