fieralingue

Interview - Antonio Lampis

As you say, it seems that Bolzano last September simply blossomed to the height of a Biennale, we were almost running from one place to the other to follow exceptional events. As the Director of the Italian Cultural Department, would you like to comment on this event?

Bolzano is not a city of art. Bolzano had the potential to become a city of culture. We have worked hard for several years to increase the offer, to stimulate a new audience. The answer has been superior to all expectations, and fairly enough today the cultural liveliness is a reason for pride for the Town and for the Province.

transart03 received by the Italian Cultural Assessorship the prize for “excellence”, would you like to explain the motivations of this choice?

To be precise, it was the prize for innovation. In particular the TRANSART Association of Appiano was prized for the cultural activity carried out in the year 2002.

The program of TRANSART was selected and recognized for its success and experience in offering an artistic calendar with a strong innovative charge in unusual and suggestive spaces, by keeping a strong closeness with the audience and a very high qualitative level. Its great innovate valence of the offer stems also from the modalities of the project and from the great capacity of attracting also a private support.

At the press conference you defined transart organizers as masters of dislocation, could you further comment?

We are witnessing today a quick change in the choices of the audience and in the habits of cultural consumption. Experts have since long analyzed a progressive decrease in “going to the theater”, “going to the cinema”, “going to concerts” balanced by the awareness of “going to see that theater director and his/her staging”, “going to see that actor or that director in ...”, “listen to the interpretation of the ... symphony directed by ...”. It mirrors a process of growth in awareness. At the same time less meaningful are containers when compared to contents. Therefore, besides the traditional sites of culture, people gather for poetry readings at archeological sites, at open-air museums, at theatrical performances in the streets or at castles, at concerts in industrial places.

Why do you think transart is so successful?

As a Dj and art lover, which do you think are the major artistic directions, what is art at the end of 2004, and towards which aim is contemporary art heading to?

My final part is explained with better words than mine in a beautiful book by Baricco. I mentioned it in an old article on Alto Adige, reference is made to the concert directed by Claudio Abbado with the European Youth Orchestra, and I will partly copy it here underneath:

... It (the concert) is the exact opposite of the assurances most people look for at so-called classical music concerts, or who instead look for chaos and the distortion of scores to please themselves with an originality finalized to itself. The most convincing words on this specific thought were written by Alessandro Baricco in his historical articles on “la Repubblica” and in a brief volume that I always advise those who are interested in music and tendencies: “Hegel’s logic and the cows of Wisconsin. Thoughts on educated music and modernity”, translated in several languages. Baricco published a text on war, blood, revenge and victory (is there anything less modern than this?), and we have to wish that the talent he shows with such grave topics equals his other sublime capacity he shows as a cultural expert and music critic. His text on music and modernity leads the reader step by step to observe the “pleased gathering of living dead” that has made of classical music the postcard of itself, that awarded generations of slavish performers instead of few true interpreter, of making of our evening a less controlled, thus boring, less emotional event; because pleasure is little chic, it is depicted as less educated. Baricco brings us to the notion that some so-called contemporary music (the dodecaphonic, atonal, the punitive one, see... you cannot understand it) is finally to be accepted as a clear example of a dead track: it is not ahead, he says, “it is somewhere else”.

Can you picture Alberto Sordi and his wife Erminia sent by their pseudo-intellectual children on intelligent holidays? Well, that one.

To forbid pleasure, not to second the natural inclination of our senses, to play with language without offering any contents, you like it or not, is the main sign of being out of our times. Puccini and Mahler, says Baricco, intuited modernity, they did not fear or were ashamed of offering pleasure, of suggesting a show, of marveling, of mixing, of stepping down a little to bring us even higher; they did not look for the new only in a change of the mechanism of language, as instead some so-called avant-gardes did. Therefore, thank you, Maestro Abbado - to listen to an orchestra directed by You always offers generous pleasure.

What can we learn from this point of view? If the world is complicated, little can be done to try to bring it back to “rigor”, to a “formal order”, to a “rarefied language”. You are already falling asleep, aren’t you?

Is the world complex, mixed, confused, troubled by its increasing speed? It is useless to try to create sly and well-ordered oases, a bravo to the one who is able to tell us of that complexity. Do you want contemporary music? Those who know well will suggest the Chemical Brothers, the Gotan Project, Timo Maas. Never heard of them? In a couple of years they will already be classics. A wonderful essay by Omar Calabrese explains modern aesthetics by using the term “Baroque” (as opposed to the category of “Classical”), better, neo-baroque. What excites, through rhythm and repetition, excess, instability, disorder, and chaos, more or less and I-do-not-know-what, the art of disorder, which is still a geometry, as the genius who applied the fractals taught.

Antonio Lampis (1964)

has a degree in Law. He studied public and communication management, and history of social and political formations.

From 1997 he has been the manager of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano as the director of Department 15 (Italian Culture). He previously worked (from December 1983) at the State Commissary’s Office for the Province of Bolzano. He performed among many, the duty of vice principal private state secretary, and finally person in charge for the law and legislative Affairs of the Commissary’s Office for the province of Bolzano. For the Presidency of the Council of the Ministries he carried out consultative activities, thus contributing to the drafting of some legislative decrees. He took part as the coordinator for the Trentino South-Tyrol region, in the Projects aimed to the Italian National Research Council, directed by Professor Sabino Cassese (Project on responsibility in Public Administration).

He taught courses in constitutional right, and teaches various masters in economy of the spectacle. He is the vice-president of the Civic theater and auditorium foundation in Bolzano, member of the commission culture and society for ARGE ALP, of the assembly for the association for the Economy of culture. He organized editorial activity, meetings, conferences and formation courses, he wrote for the newspaper Alto Adige. Journalist, author of two monographs, speaker at numerous meeting on topics related to his publications: autonomy of South Tyrol, rights for linguistic minorities, public management, marketing, cultural organizer and promoter.