Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Nicoletta Pedrana
Good afternoon to all of you, earthlings.
We come from the planet Atelier Dell'Errore,
a constellation of Child Neuropsychiatry.
We arrived in this beautiful theatre
accompanied by a menagerie of some 30 large animals
that were born from the work
of our Visual Arts Laboratory for Child Neuropsychiatry.
We were guided here
by this beast of two meters by three called the tri-checo in-namorato,
the en-amoured wal-rus,
as Giovanni taught us back at the atelier.
Giovanni is an important boy in the history of the atelier,
because 12 years ago, when confronted with a precise request,
"Come on Giovanni, let’s do a drawing",
he replied, with the same precision,
"No, I 'can't' draw!"
and "I 'can't' draw" is different from the "I can’t draw"
with which, I believe, the majority of us
would be able to circumvent the request for a drawing, here and now.
It is the reiterated "you don’t 'know how'"
that inside him becomes "I 'can't' draw", which is a self-limitation,
a self-mutilation of one's ability to read the world.
And yet, working at the atelier,
we have discovered over time
that even this sort of artistic miseducation,
this graphic desertion,
has its advantages.
It has its advantages
in terms of the energy conveyed by the sign,
its expressive force.
And all of this is a fundamental component
of a structured environment at the service of Child Neuropsychiatry,
and at the same time it's a boon for the world of visual arts as such.
For this reason, from that day of 12 years ago,
sign after sign, afternoon after afternoon,
we have always drawn in the atelier.
Now it's Ayub’s turn.
We were accustomed to Ayub’s arrivals in atelier
with pictures on his phone of beautiful girls.
Young girls he fell in love with - he said;
he got engaged to - he said;
and then he left - he said.
On the depth of his feelings, and above all his actual engagement.
his group mates were beginning to harbour more than a doubt
To defend his honour,
one afternoon he arrived in the atelier and said,
"Today I was dumped by one of my young girls,
and so today I can't draw,
because I’m feeling as sad as a kangaroo".
"Why, are all the kangaroos you know sad?"
And he replied "No. They are not all sad, however, there is a sad-hearted kangaroo".
"Well, perfect,
show us what this sad-hearted kangaroo is like…"
Here, he gave us this creature
drawn with bare, essential,
surgical lines, one could say with easy self-irony,
given that Ayub has in his curriculum a dozen operations to the head,
certified by as many scars.
However, it is also indicative of what Ayub’s strength is:
he always knows how to play things down.
In fact, the kangaroo is winking at its audience
with a smile and a clever eye.
What about the rest?
It is a baggy body,
containing the enormity of a heart full of all the sadness of the world.
It does not even need upper limbs:
it rests directly upon its heart's sadness.
The kids again, try to cheer Ayub up,
help him and say,
"Okay, Ayub, you could try to invite one of these girls out to McDonald's,
you like it so much".
"But no, I can't, I've already tried,
but every time I find myself in front of one of these girls I like,
I become a shy fly at a loss for words".
Well, "A shy fly at a loss for words"
is in itself a true and proper poem
with its naming in four flayed words,
a sort of ultra-zoological Haiku,
of those that we often hear at the atelier when it comes to naming these creatures.
What we are left with is a moscoid
that has never appeared on the face of the earth
since the early days of creation,
a fly that looks as if it will never be able to be a fly.
There is always an autobiographical slant
to all the kids’ creatures.
Now that you have, I believe,
seen how the animals of the atelier look at themselves
and, above all, how they see themselves,
I’ll leave you in the company of the rest of the menagerie,
while I tell you a little about our history.
I am a visual artist
and for 12 years I've been running this visual arts laboratory
for the Child Neuropsychiatric clinic of the Reggio Emilia health district,
and for three years,
also for the Territorial Child Neuropsychiatry clinic
at the hospital in Bergamo.
Kids come to the atelier with the most diverse pathologies,
from more or less severe forms of intellectual disability
to syndromes and disorders,
they too of a disparate nature, from the simplest to the most complex,
some of which, despite their sweet-sounding names,
have a pretty devastating effect on the lives of kids.
Fragile X syndrome, Tourette syndrome,
and also some cases from the infamous autism spectrum.
While we are an atelier
fundamentally structured on narration and on interaction,
so basically unsuitable for autistic painters,
but we cultivate five or six exceptions we are very proud of:
after all, who would have ever expected Arnulf Reiner,
one of the greatest living painters,
to invite two of our girls
to open an international exhibition
in Munich, Bavaria,
in two weeks?
You are all invited, of course.
Let’s say that there is a common denominator
linking all these pathologies,
and this common denominator, centred on self-esteem and socialisation,
is also the reason why they're sent to a visual arts atelier,
as a complementary service to Child Neuropsychiatry.
The self-esteem of these kids, my kids, is next to zero.
They are the ones who, as a rule,
are marginalised at school as students with special needs.
But we worked hard,
bolstered and boosted their low energy levels,
put in all the time needed for kids coming with the most diverse histories
and faced so many challenges,
daily challenges;
or better, they challenged themselves and one another.
So many bets: we somehow took a gamble with each of these kids.
The work done, based on very strict rules, is beginning to bring its rewards.
The more rewarding the work is, the harder and better we work.
And we start with our first exhibitions, the first invitations to events,
a few books.
What about the kids? They are re-vived.
Just imagine one of these kids,
who routinely camps out at school with a special needs teacher,
coming in one day and saying,
"Miss, this is our art book.
See? It's about me, there's my name, there's the work I do with my friends,
this is my animal and I only know why it looks like this".
And, maybe we’ve just presented it
at the Literature Festival in Ivrea: it happened.
Or at the Bergamo Science festival: that happened too.
Or we’ve been to the Arte Verona contemporary art fair -
"You know, Miss, 200 people were waiting for us!
And we had fun standing under our creature
and seeing the faces of all those strangers
who paid €5 to come and see our work".
This kind of personal experience,
this authentic gratification,
is somehow the enduring legacy of the work done in the atelier,
an enduring legacy that, come what may,
nobody in the world will ever be able to deprive them of.
As for socialisation, it's even simpler:
I say, "Excuse me,
how come you already knew each other before arriving in the atelier?"
"Well, it's easy: we are those who have a special needs teacher.
Or, "We are the ones who never get invited to birthday parties".
Very easy and not surprising, given their problems.
What instead has always surprised me
is the fact that this marginalisation often spreads to the families
and they too suffer from social exclusion
when they have children with these problems.
This led us, four years ago,
to found an association called "Atelier Dell'Errore Onlus",
which has the task of involving parents in this work.
They obviously cannot come to atelier, it would be pointless.
Instead, they can help us
spread their children's work outside the atelier.
Now I would like to tell you,
why we call ourselves the “Atelier Dell'Errore”,
and why we are so proud of this name.
So, the first reason is, in the atelier the first and biggest mistake,
was just me,
in the sense that it was not a job I chose.
Now, twelve years on, I can say, with a certain serenity,
that perhaps it was the job that chose me.
I was chosen by the atelier,
and maybe that's why it turned out quite well too.
But I suffered, during that first year in the atelier:
I felt inadequate,
I felt unsuitable compared to a complexity that I was not familiar with,
the complexity of these kids.
And above all, from a visual arts' perspective,
I had not yet sensed
the depth and breadth of the children’s imagination,
because this special imagination of theirs, as you can see,
is hidden under layers of defeats
that is hard to penetrate, to drill through.
This is the problem,
how to allow this wealth of images to emerge in the light of the sun.
Racist qualms, for instance, have helped us over time.
There is the surfacing of creatures I deem amazing,
not so much in terms of their graphic impact,
but because of the stories, the stories they guard.
And then, if I felt I was a mistake for an afternoon a week,
by listening to them, I realized
that they actually feel a mistake seven days a week,
four weeks a month, twelve months a year.
This awareness helped me make a qualitative leap
in terms of my inner vision:
I managed to abandon, for a while,
the "normaloidity" of my perspective.
I took this leap to the other side where this world was disclosing,
the world of the atelier where you learn, for example,
that the opposite of "normal" is "special".
The opposite of "looking" is "seeing".
The opposite of "hearing", of "listening’" is 'feeling'.
These are the first two reasons why we are the “Atelier Dell'Errore”.
The third, instead, is of a more methodological nature:
ours is not an art school, we are anti-academic by definition.
We do experiment a lot.
And therefore, it is not my intent to turn them into designers by profession,
but I want them to gain confidence
in the possibility of becoming original and originating creators of creatures.
This means that,
in front of the sheet that collects the shapeless signs of the first failures,
you do not give up, which would be easy,
but you try to look and see, where everyone looks and few see,
which seems to me an excellent poetic exercise.
And then, you start from a zebra that stumbles and becomes an ant,
gets up again to become a dragon,
and then maybe, finally,
enters the unknown:
one of these animals, unique in the world,
as unique in the world as we all are,
starting from them.
Having said that, if we think about it,
had we not all inherited a DNA capable
not only of generating mistakes
but also of confronting them and overcoming them,
this evening we too would be
more or less 555 well-aligned bacteria,
and this is the third reason
why we are very proud to be the “Atelier Dell'Errore”.
Now I would like - and let’s hope it will bring us luck -
to tell you about this year's main project.
I have five kids who are moving from Child Neuropsychiatry
to Adult Handicaps.
Unfortunately, this means engaging in occupational therapy,
exactly the opposite of what we do at the atelier.
The problem is that if you open a person’s mind
you can't then expect them to become close-minded on command,
and therefore there is a noticeable maladjustment
in the passage to adult handicaps.
What we want to do is build a work-training group.
I would like it to become a high school of visual arts
for children who come from Child Neuropsychiatry,
capable of funding itself with operations like these:
installations, urban projects,
and even graphics, or work for publishers.
If we manage to,
well, maybe then we can achieve a small big social utopia,
which is the squaring of the circle of the project.
Maybe, perhaps, let’s hope so.
That is to transform a criticality, a social issue
into a form of wealth.
A form of social wealth that is beauty.
Unfortunately, beauty is a term
that has been ousted by a number of variations.
Certainly it is not the self-referential
and hedonistic beauty of "Beauty is what I like".
No. It is none of this.
It is not even let's say, the cosmetic notion of beauty
with which the world of advertising annoys us.
It is a beauty that has much older roots.
Beauty as an intermediary, as metaxu,
as mediation for the good of man, a good to be sought, to be shared.
Now let's take a step back from modernity, let's go back to two centuries ago,
to beauty as perfectly defined by our dear Prince Myshkin,
in "The Idiot", by Dostoevsky: a beauty that will save the world.
We still believe in this at the atelier.
Thank you all!
(Applause)