First members meeting
Art Creativity: towards an Inter-Mediterranean Politic
Cittadellarte, Biella, 28th September 2002

Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto has started in 2001-2002 a programme of activities called Intermediterraneo in order to establish a network for the exchange of ideas and the forming of operative relations. The aim is to build new cultural, economic and political perspectives in the society living around the Mediterranean basin, which is made up of various peoples, ethnic groups, religions, forms of trade, and has a history that dates back to the very beginnings of Middle Eastern and Western civilization.
What can be considered a first stage of love Difference is the institution, on June 21st 2002 of the "Associazione per costituire Love Difference"; a "Love Difference" installation is on show in the "La Nuova Agorà" exhibition in Cittadellarte from June 22nd to October 31st.
The first big event by Love Difference is the conference entitled "Art Creativity: towards an Inter-Mediterranean Politic" held in Cittadellarte on September 28th 2002.
The aim of the meeting is to discuss if and how art (understood in the broad sense of creativity) and culture can set in motion a process of transformation that in some way has an impact on the social and economic policies of the countries facing onto the Mediterranean.

Speakers:
- Chiara Bertola, curator, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy (conference moderator)
- Manolo Borja, Director of MACBA, Barcelona, Spain
- Giorgio Busetto, Director of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy
- Giuliano Della Pergola, Professor of Urban and Rural Sociology, Polytechnic of Milan, Italy
- Enver Hadziomerspahic, Director of ARSAEVI, Sarajevo, Bosnia
- Soumaya Naamane Guessous , Professor of sociology, Mohammedia, Morocco
- Michel Maffesoli, philosopher and Professor of Sociology, Sorbonne, Paris, France
- Michelangelo Pistoletto, artist, Italy
- Walter Santagata, Professor of Economic Policy and the Economy of Culture and the Arts, University of Turin, Italy
- Younis Tawfik, writer, Iraq

Here a text by Chiara Bertola about the birth of Love Difference

When Michelangelo Pistoletto ask me to take a hand in shaping Love Difference, a creative movement and one of thought aimed at grafting a political commitment onto art, I immediately thought that he had put his finger on something which the art system needed and which I personally felt to be lacking in my current work as curator. Art as producer of art objects is no longer enough today, whereas the need to escape from preconceived judgements on art and seek new ways for creativity has become impellent. Creativity can occupy spaces that up till now were foreign to it or had never been set in relation to it. It can be employed differently, and I’m thinking of
systems of economic production, for bringing closer to material reality.With Love Difference a movement of thought and action has come into being, one destined to lead, through creative commitment, to the formation of a network of links with and among the different countries of the Mediterranean area. A further idea is this: to discuss in what way art can set going a process of transformation that has effect, in some way, on the social and economic policies of the countries that border on the Mediterranean. In other words, to ask whether art can become politics today.It is therefore important to manage to give birth and sustain a new way of thinking to inspire politics and economics. The seed-bed of this way of thinking is precisely Love Difference, which can become the creative workshop of socially committed art. Of course, a way of thinking that has more utopia to it than reality! But how is one to live
without this prospects and without the idea of trying to achieve them? - and in the light of the tragic and complex facts of current political strategies, more than ever.The introductory document of the movement states: «the political systems, traditionally understood, by now show insufficient capacity to deal with and resolve the great problems inherent in the on-going dramatic epochal transformation that involves society world wide besides damaging the physical state of the planet. Now the western world talks of art and creativity as extreme resources to be exploited in order to re-establish control on things. But creative commitment now demands the taking of responsibilities altogether more important than one thinks». It seems to me that this is a point to be stressed because I think that faced with the road indicated by the dangerous strategies of progress united and badly exploited by economic-political ones, the world is basing itself on values that threaten to crush and wipe out weaker subjects, relegating to the background, in relation with others, a non-violent value of affirmation. The events of today - technology, exploitation of natural resources, elimination of weak economies, etc - are producing incalculable and dangerous chain events, driving them towards the point beyond which the danger becomes irremediable.

It is here that the commitment of art can enter the game by indicating different modes of production and the exploitation of materials. If then one pauses to think that
the economic logic of the art system forces creativity to lose sight of issues of this import, then one feels an even greater need for a movement like Love Difference that seeks to produce thinking and let us hope action, that can relate in a different way to events in the society of the 21st century. This movement has taken the name Love difference almost as a programmatic slogan linking the universality of art to the idea of political trans-nationality and putting in first place the welcome of differences among peoples. It has then chosen, as cultural terrain for its own thought and action, the Mediterranean area, an area that has always been the cradle of differences between ethnoi, religions and cultures and, for that very reason, cause of terrible conflicts where the supremacy of powers has always sought to level out differences. So «[...] uniformity and difference are the two warring terms that represent the maximum conflictual tension in the current planetary situation [...]».But let’s go ahead. The new-born story of Love Difference, has nevertheless behind it a first conference: Creativity of art for an InterMediterranean policy, held at Cittadellarte on 28 September 2002, which succeeded in developing and enriching this first theoretical premise.

The speech by Giuliano Della Pergola opened the conference and made immediately clear that the Mediterranean, though a very small place, nevertheless contains the greatest number of symbols. We know that the Mediterranean has always been par excellence the workshop of difference among peoples, ethnoi, religions, languages, arts and trade. And it is true, as Della Pergola remarked, that the problem has always been the others. Others always experienced as those who set a limit, the limit where our culture ends because another’s begins. That feature of the Mediterranean, contained even in its name (mediumterrae), of link between lands, has never been very credible or achieved, as unfortunately the opposite has: eliminable conflict.

Love Difference thus enters on the issue of the contradictions to which history has consigned us, and whatshould be accomplished, through this movement, is an cultural upheaval: the turning of the Mediterranean into an basin of shared resources and no longer a place of conflicts. Re-interpreting the conflicts in the light of a new possibility for co-existence. In that prospect and desire we heard at the conference the words of Younis Tawfik – an Iraqi in exile in Turin since 1979, professor of Arab literature - who spoke of a sea that should be shared and not split and who offered a splendid image: that of a Mediterranean whose waters reflect the diverse cultures like sunbeams.

But there has been positive experience of co-existence between different cultures and ethnoi, and it is that which for decades existed in Sarajevo. Enver Hadi_omerspahi_, director of the Ars Aevi project, reminded us that what held things together during the war and did something was precisely art, creativity, it was artists. I remember his conclusion, precise and essential, in proposing a true and proper ‘shift of line’, an inversion of values in the culture of the society of today. He indicated a series of actions whereby it is possible to reduce distance while maintaining difference: «from oneself to others»; «from objects to subjects»; «from the sole truth to diversity»; «from the superfluous to the creative». In brief, a great step towards freedom. In summary, art seems ever more destined to escape the limitations of being art object to become action and doing; and ever more intent on facing up to the experience of real and productive life.

The indispensable need to set something equally strong against American culture was a pressing issue for Giorgio Busetto. The Mediterranean can be the answer that sets a
‘anamerican’ culture to temper capitalism. Indicating also inthis way a space for the ‘ugly’ apart from that just for the ‘beautiful’.

The words of Michel Leiris come to mind on the subject of the feelings felt in having to move house as a child «when every habit is hijacked ....then, as one drifts, one might
imagine a philosophy of removing, dry stone wall foundation the constituent parts of which, taken in the rough state and left autonomous, must stand (as in every respectable construction of ideas) exclusively in virtue of gravity and don’t require the artifice of mortar to hold together.» (quoted in Canevacci, p.34, Genoa 1995) What has always interested me in these words is the indication of shifting of thought, of welcome for a different and changeful situation, while still remaining within the same landscape and without losing one’s domestic scenery (of “objects” and “furniture”). In that allowing of the culture of the other to blend and enrich one’s own, it would already be much to learn how to ‘shift the traditional ordering of thoughts and relocate them, (think them?) in different ambits. I’m convinced that through this ‘shifting of thought’, the different culture of the other can find its own space.

At the conference proposals also emerged from which I imagine a start could be made towards concrete activity for Love Difference. Something extremely concrete and interesting I heard in the speech by Walter Santagata in which, beginning from the consideration that culture must be a shared good especially as economic contribution, we must first of all get the two spheres - culture and economy – to challenge each other. If that is to happen it’s important to modify and reconsider the concept of culture so as to reconnect it to a real world.

If we consider culture not just as an artistic manifestation, but as active part of a wider field of knowledge, we find a link between creativity and the development of a society. It would be important to modify the concept of culture and of art, in the belief that it is possible to insert them into the mechanisms of economic production. Santagata spoke of culture having extremely strong roots in a given terrain, with the accumulation of know-how that has developed in that place: this material culture deserves to be valorised and recovered. And, to make things clear, culture is also the glass that has been produced for centuries on Murano, the wine that after years the growers of the Langhe have finally managed to valorise and get produced with a label; culture is the soap that for 3,500 years has been produced in Aleppo and that could be valorised even more. Entering on this culture/knowledge for the purposes of an artistic project means that one has to consider culture not only as an artistic manifestation but as the global image of the social and spiritual life of a people. It is the concept that here in Italy we call ‘material culture. This perspective is extremely interesting when one thinks that it could become a way to activate creativity within a natural system of production. Identifying know-how, pointing out the vocation of the location, binding it to the material and making it become an economic fact.

Today, Love Difference, has been invited to take part in the exhibition Utopia Station at the 50th Venice International Biennial of Art, one of the greatest exhibitions of power within the art system. It’s to be hoped for this new-born movement that the occasion of the Biennial may be truly a “Trojan Horse’ allowing Love Difference and the ideas that underpin it to become known, creating exchanges and contrasts useful for shared action in the direction of the welcoming of difference, and not just enrolment in a list of titles and words picked out only because ‘interesting and contemporary’.

by Chiara Bertola, curator, Fondazione Querini Stampalia

:: download an abstract of the speech by Giuliano Della Pergola
:: download an abstract of the speech by Soumaya Naamane Guessous
:: download an abstract of the speech by Michel Maffesoli
:: download an abstract of the speech by Walter Santagata