I discovered Elizabeth Peyton in 2002 in NYC. Venturing to the PS1 for the first time with my friend Lys we saw these fabulous drawings on paper , and one of them hit me with incredible force. It was a portrait of the British solo sailor Ellen McArthur, in an orange heavy-duty boat gear, her short cropped hair swept by the wind and her eyes glowing from a gale-proof smile like the one you see in the picture here below. Continue reading ‘people we like @ Berlin – Elizabeth Peyton’
This week Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof turned five. No matter how criticized, it’s a place I quite enjoy. Compared with other railway stations I find it warm and almost cosy. For me it has a peculiar sense of place, it’s not belonging to the so called “non-places”.
When changing trains I like to take my time a moment and sit down for a cappuccino or an ice-cream al fresco, something impossible at Milano Centrale. There is a good fish restaurant with a view on the Kanzlerei, quite cosy for those gray winter lunch-time departures. Browsing at the newsstand/bookstore is made easy thanks to the good layout (trolleys matter) and the intriguing selection. It’s busy but never alienating. And when you arrive by train in town Hauptbahnhof presents you with a fabulous skyline of the city.
Photo: Friedrichstadtpassage, Rainer Fetting @ Berlinische Galerie
Duncan Jones full immersion: yesterday night we went to see Source Code with B&S, our friends from Pigneto-F’hain.
How was the movie? Kapooresque…we loved it.
I like Alexander Lehmann’s short movies. I discovered Lehmann’s channel on YouTube thanks to his provocative yet very true “Lieber Afrikaner”. In this Buugle movie he extrapolates the Google Streetview concerns to a new level. Continue reading ‘Berluugle’
This year marks the 20th anniversary of my emigration to France. I love the word emigration. It reminds me of sparrows which cross our skies in the evenings in this season. Of heading somewhere far and then coming back. Emigration is something that everyone in its 20s should do at least once in one’s life. It means going somewhere without knowing exactly if and when you are coming back, or how long you are long to stay. It rhymes with adventure.
As I got to Paris I discovered a few things unknown to me back in Mitteleuropean Triest. Continue reading ’3615 bonjour’
In the 80s we did not have Macs and iPads at home but many among us did spend part of the night surfing in a compulsive way nonetheless, or at least, I did. I listened to the radio. And it was even more magic and hypnotic than the World Wide Web.
It all started when my cousin introduced me to the mystique of the British illegal radio stations broadcasting from ships in the North Sea: Continue reading ‘My own private STASI?’
Kudamm is 125. We’ve grown fond of ye olde shopping street. Friedrichstrasse is the first place where you go as a tourist, with all its post-1989 bling. But when you’ve been in Berlin for a while you will surprise yourself heading to old Kudamm regularly, more often than you think, no matter how kitsch you first thought Kudamm was. Continue reading ‘kudamm: well-deserved kudos’
I am now reading another graphic novel: Marzi, by Sowa and Savoia. The childhood of a Polish girl (Sowa). Marzi is set in the 80s and there’s Jaruzelskij and Chernobyl, Solidarnosc and the Pope. 
In a sense it’s my teenage years. I remember the empty shelves of the Emona Slovenian supermarkets. The availability of just one brand of biscuits. Chocolates had to be with cherry filling. The difference is that we would travel across the border, to Yugoslavia, to do some selected shopping. The first private butchers started to appear in Slovenia and their home-slaughtered meats were very good. They preferred to sell to foreigners in order to make bigger profits.
Sometimes we felt awkward because the locals were queuing at the state-owned shops. We felt we were “robbing” them of their best products. But on the other hand, with the somewhat “harder” currency (the lira!) the butcher could invest in livestock and employ some people, and change some lives. We were very fond of our Slovenian butchers.
We would buy meat, yogurt (which was much better than the Italian one) and sometimes I insisted in having my Dad buying me some Napolitaner (wafers with a pink packaging – State products) and the legendary Pez candies with their capitalistic-Disney plastic dispensers.
Later, during my teenage years, I had many penpals from the Socialist Countries. And learnt what a Pewex store was from my friend Gregorz from Czestochowa and what the STASI was from my many DDR friends.
We were not living in a socialist country. But in Triest we knew very well what it meant.
Each year come May my Mitteleuropean & Slovenian childhood comes back to my mind with fond memories. Lilac shrubs, maypoles and red flags. The workers’ holiday did coincide with a typical Central-Northern-European pagan holiday, a sort of Sacre du Printemps plus initiation ritual: the Fantovska.
In the last days of April boys over 16 would meet in the evening to work for the first time at the May celebrations. They would meet each night for a week and one morning each village would wake up realizing that May has arrived yet again! Each white karst mountain top would have several red flags bursting with clear burian N/E wind, the boys would have set the flags during night treks – even without the moonlight sometimes. An initiation. Continue reading ‘Fantovska, majenca and vitovska’
In 1991 I had just emigrated to Paris and my answers to these questions would have been exactly the same. It is sad to say that 20 years later twenty-somethings still have to give the same answers, and that thirty-somethings who tried to go back to Italy in order to give back something to the country who gave them an excellent education and wanted to change things are disappointed and are heading abroad once again.
Nothing has changed in Italy.
L’Italia è una Repubblica democratica fondata sul lavoro. This is what our healthy Constitution says right at the start. But democracy and work are the values in short supply. These are the main reasons why people are leaving the country.
One of the young women says in the interview “Italy confuses globalization with exploitation. Flexibility with precariousness”. I would also add that for this reason, neither capitalism and liberism nor solidarity and welfare exist in Italy. Because work means productivity but also reward. Performance but also sustainability. Rules but also meritocracy.
