FOR A FREE LOOK
by DAVIDE DORMINO
…You have to aim far away, keeping your feet firmly rooted to the ground.
The bronze sculpture created by Davide Dormino depicts two fingers – life-size thumb and index finger – clutching a small seed. The gesture is the same as when one wants to point the eye at something far away, using the hand as a kind of telescope.
In this way, the work -positioned on the Piazza of Maranola, from where one looks out to look at the sea- shows us the route to Ventotene, the place of inspiration for the “Ventotene Manifesto,” written in 1941 during fascist confinement by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi.
The “Manifesto,” whose original title was “For a Free and United Europe. Draft of a Manifesto,” is today considered one of the founding texts of the European Union because it drew in clear strokes the idea of a united and democratic Europe founded on ideals of peace and freedom.
Confined by fascism to the citadel of Ventotene, a small group of visionaries and fighters wrote some of the most beautiful pages of freethought, where they dreamed of a Europe liberated from the nightmares of militarism and national bureaucratism, […] imbued with a strong sense of social solidarity.
Surely their gaze was unobstructed and traveling far away, while their eyes were probably on the mainland, or perhaps on the very nearby St. Stephen’s Prison, which enclosed illustrious anti-fascists within its circular walls, built according to Jeremy Bentham’s odious principle of panoptic surveillance.
“For a Free and United Europe.” was written between 1941 and 1944, distributed clandestinely first among the internees, soon became a divisive text among the more than eight hundred political prisoners of various backgrounds, but it transformed the island into a great laboratory of ideas and critical thinking. Brave women who remained free were entrusted with the task of distributing these pages to the rest of Italy.
This story, now planted in Maranola, demonstrates how the exercise of a free gaze can fertilize the imagination to give birth to an idea and, perhaps, a concrete project.
The seed enclosed between Davide Dormino’s fingers is the same one that Seminaria ten years ago planted in the fertile soil of this small village and that today bears fruit thanks to visionary collaborations that help the project fly far beyond the confines of the ancient medieval walls.
This is not the first time that Davide Dormino, through sculpture and interaction with the public, has drawn attention to political and social issues. Recall, for example, the monumental work “Anything to say?” dedicated to Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, “chosen as examples of contemporary revolutionaries, controversial heroes capable of unhinging the rules of a system of control that runs all our lives.”
“Anything to say?” a traveling and interactive sculpture, has so far been exhibited in the main squares of Europe (Italy, Germany, France, Slovenia, Serbia, Switzerland) and represents perhaps better than any of Davide Dormino’s other works the antecedent of “For a Free Look,” the new work conceived for Seminaria 2021.
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Location: Ricca Square, Maranola
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