13. Stefano Chiodi
50 minutes to retrace the role of a brilliant and isolated figure, of the Italian militant art critic Alberto Boatto. A few years after his death, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, dedicates an important focus to him with materials selected from his archive. Stefano Chiodi, curator of the exhibition, narrates for “Rubriche d’Aria” how critical writing experienced by Boatto, as an intellectual act alien to cultural strategies and policies, becomes a “gaze from the outside”, a glimpse of the shipwreck from outer space, thus, of someone who observes the world from an external, solitary, remote point, and captures a new and surprising physiognomy…
“… in the era of space travel … the image of planet Earth has changed thanks to the photographs of the satellites … this cosmological suggestion leads Boatto to think about what gaze is, what gaze entails from the outside, for the first time this gaze cancels human differences, the Earth is united … Boatto thus substracts himself from actuality, but pays a price which is isolation, loneliness, remoteness, as an astronaut in orbit, instead he gains an unparalleled vision of the world as a whole…”