The incoercible melancholic anarchy of small things

The first image of the series I am presenting here is dedicated to my father, whose birth centenary falls in 2023; he was a member of the Resistance, an official of the Italian Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s, then a history teacher in high school, a poet and a devotee of the sublime art of the calembour, but above all always devoted to that superior form of freedom of thought constituted by the capacity for irony and self-irony.

Today, that freedom of thought is being challenged here in our country not so much by the single-mindedness of some illiberal regime, but by the pervasive treacle that passes off an ideology, and many lies, as incontrovertible facts in almost all the media, and our part of the world as the absolute good in the fight against evil obscurantism and disorder.
Reality, fortunately, is always more complicated and ambiguous than how it is portrayed, and disorder is inherent in both big and small things.

Small things, precisely, the images that make up this work, a diagonal that cuts through the orderly succession of rectangles on the wall, a strange cloud on a building, a few circles on a table, a biased knot on a clothesline, somewhat melancholic metaphors of the irrepressible anarchy that animates and makes all things, small or larges, wonderfully contradictory and inconsistent in the eyes of those who care to look.

I would like to close by quoting again a short poem by my father that also seems pertinent to the rest of the photographs in this work:

“Un cipresso di quelli tutti lavorati
Fatti a punta con la base larga tonda
Proporzionata con cura
Come se ne vedono nella campagna toscana
Aveva un ciuffo di rami disadattato
Uscito dalla fila
Con la curva inarmonica dell’ironia
Verso quell’ordinata società di rami.” […](Franco Coppa, in Carte Segrete n.26, July-December 1974, pp. 53-54)