LONDON. Discuss and write about culture in Milan in the days when one of the centers free of the metropolis, the Cox 18, is cleared by methods old and unhappy, raises doubts about the heavy awareness of this city against its social, cultural, civil and political. That's why the public project signed Alfredo Jaar, " Questions Questions " , celebrated a few days ago at a conference dedicated to the research culture in Milan and Italy (promoted, theater Litta, by province and foundation Hangar Bicocca), succeeded only partially. Over one hundred days of questions addressed to the inhabitants of Milan, through posters and video screens, panels and postcard, using space usually occupied by advertising, what they left behind in the shadow of the Palazzo Marino? And among the citizens? Doubts? Reflections on stature, but huge invisible, Antonio Gramsci, and Giuseppe Ungaretti Pierpaolo Pasolini? Maybe. They have, however, ignored any deep investigation of the critical issues and the conference "We have forgotten the culture?" Has reaffirmed the essential ambiguity. In his homeland, Chile, horrible years of the Pinochet dictatorship, Jaar Santiago had started filling up with words: "Are you happy?", he asked, a little 'a bit spontaneous' rhetoric, with his compatriots. "Questions Questions" has dropped the same formula in the mass media dictatorship that Jaar, first, to recognize the Italy of today. "What is culture? policy needs culture? Culture is social criticism? Culture, where are you? "Was read for months, and white letters on burgundy background night, on squares and streets, with trams and subways, buildings and monitor. And again: "In Search of Pasolini in Milan ...";" The culture of the emergency ..."; so on, in a chain of microprovocazioni. Many eyes were raised to read, to suffer, and a few to answer. Jaar did not seek answers: "Through these actions I wanted to work in the shadow of three masters, Gramsci, and Pasolini Ungaretti - told the Litta - to penetrate the system anywhere in its cracks, and generate an image of change through public space . Of change has never been read and written so much at least thirty years: "The culture has imagined a Barack Obama even before it existed one. Culture is powerful, "he chanted Jaar. A power, both positive and negative if, as has sharply underlined the anthropologist Marco Aime, among Guests at the conference, the term has come to replace the culture of twentieth-century race. "We are witnessing acts of cultural fundamentalism, which are based on a very simple rhetoric, that dell'ognuno 'at home' and identity as a single identity. But the cultures of the yards are always open. " Just the tools of the shipyard culture penetrate the concerns about the work of Jaar in Milan. To give them a voice was Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev , the next curator of Documenta, which has admitted difficulties in accepting, without a doubt, "Questions Questions": " Let us ask ourselves: is there really still space public or completely privatized? " . Who knows Milan from the nearest node knows how this cultural melting in a city increasingly standardized, intoxicated by private speculation. An intervention like that of Chilean may be unwittingly complicit in the superficiality of knowledge that you hear the collective, interconnected, but it is fragile. What do we mean when we speak knowingly of public art? On this key question was not answered. Only works with high schools in the artistic intentions of Jaar found suitable locations for an educational purpose, of course crucial. So who is right has insisted that all project materials are donated to schools. Training outside the perimeter, a retraining civic there was, and instead of questions of Jaar are back images of the usual publicity. And the talk of the intellectual salon. [Published in the extended version, in English, on Succoacido.net ]
