In Quarta Persona: 1960–2018
Utopia, Revolt, Disappearance

And he is mad eye of the fourth person singular of which nobody speaks. And he is the voice of the fourth person singular in which nobody speaks and which yet exists.

“HE” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (to Allen Ginsberg), 1959

According to French philosopher Gilles Deleuze,the fourth person singular is the result of combining different points of view. Linguistically this combination takes the shape of “free indirect discourse” where the narrator is literally unrecognisable. A sort of transcendence, a linguistic paradox that finds its logic, its essence, in its indefinableness. During its creation, the project you’re seeing has undergone an expressive disruption of similar value, finding its shape in accumulation, its time in dispersion, its idea in conflict, its subjectivity in the act of research itself. In History, the voice in which nobody speaks and which yet exists, it has found its narrative, its spinning compass. A thin strip of land in the womb of the Mediterraneansea has been witness — victim and perpetrator — tothis journey: Calabria. Case–study of this research, it is the geographic and metaphorical perimeter within which “In Quarta Persona” organises its visual ecosystem. After all, here too, in one of the many South, beginning in the 60s - in the midst of the so-called economic miracle, the societies involved in that new future started a radical, unconditional process of transformation of lands and customs, in the name of a certain progress, made up of new machines, new roads, new slogans. With industrialisation, the modern world was inaugurated across every landscape, by imposing its codes and aesthetics, but above all a new Power, which in Calabria — or in one of the many South — offered the common man two destinies: either be oppressed or be corrupted. A desert was imagined, in between.