Our Italian comrades Ginevra Sanguigno, Patrizia Mainardi, and Cristina Finotti organized a one week course entitled “Re(x)sistance” — making a play on words where one could read “resistance” or “re-exisistance”.
Amongst the snow-capped mountains of Pruno di Stazzema, in the Lucca region of Tuscany, there was a one-week project of doing the School for Designing a Society in Italian.
We created neologisms using parts of Italian and English words. Before the week was over, Cristina made a presentation on “Transistance” (Translation + Resistance). She spoke of times/places at which the transposition of ideas from one area of human language to another. For instance, the fashion show in Milan where the mysterious designer Serpica Naro debuted — “Serpica Naro” is an anagram for “San Precario” which in Italian would mean roughly “Saint of Precariousness” which refers to “precarious labor,” a term applied in particular to the exploitation of cheap labor — in this fashion show there were designs to expose the plight of migrant laborers, and to emphasize the body shape of pregnant women, thus exposing the stereotypes that oppress the workers upon whose labor the fashion industry rests. Today, Serpica Naro is a political movement that fights against exploitative working conditions.
Cristina had us chop up fashion magazines to turn the fashion models into puppets for little anti-commercial puppet shows. We debated the issue of culture jamming.
A puppet master named Mariano Dolce paid us a visit, in which he described his 30+ years practicing puppetry in Italy, primarily in Reggio Emilia. Mariano first got involved in puppets during the Vietnam War, and he recalled stories of going from hospital room to hospital room, inspiring debates betwee the patients by using puppets to bring up political issues, such as the legality of divorce (which was an issue in Italy at that time). He went on to work with mental patients and children in an area of Italy renowned for its system of childhood education. See: The Hundred Languages of Children.
Particularly interesting was Mariano’s way of describing the constraints of the medium of puppetry — such that the puppet medium has it’s own language and its own field of potential.
Thursday evening we performed in the nearby town of Pietrasanta. We used a mixture of Italian and English scripts, and pieces which relied on gesture and non-linguistic acoustics. The below video provides a grainy glimpse of one piece, in which a sequence of faces and sounds were performed before the bubbles burst.
Video -QT