THE DANCE OF SUB-SENTIENT
AND SUPER-SENTIENT LIFE:
ON CHIARA FUMAI
Some art practices develop like a life-long research on force: such is the case of the work of Italian artist Chiara Fumai. Her work is an incredible exercise in reporting from inside the sensory qualities of life. Through different media, she performs a fact: the very difficulty of achieving the imaginary realm tactilely, visually or haptically. Solidity is just one aspect of what is real, but it is far from the most important one, though it may be the more obvious. The philosopher John Locke once said: “It is impossible to create imaginary persons if one has not created space for them.” Chiara Fumai identifies the task of art as taking upon itself the production of this space.
Imaginary seeing, imaginary hearing, imaginary touch, imaginary taste and imaginary smell constitute the traits of an expanded reality where real and imagined perception mimic each other.
We live in a world that constantly stresses the importance of mindfulness and meditation. Yet we lack examples of how these mental states may interact and mingle with our everyday perceptions. Meditation, like mindfulness, is conceived as something we can perform separately from everything that we do and sense during the day. It has the status of a fundamental exercise, but one that has its own time and space and, like the Genie, does not leave the lamp. In the hands of Chiara Fumai, however, performance, painting, sculpture and drawing bring about the possibility of freeing the Genie. Her practice and personal energy were devoted to mingling common sensory perception and socially trained behavior with all the forces active in our imagined worlds.
Forms of contradiction
Performance allowed her to perform. This is not just a rhetorical device; it constitutes her method. Interested in magic, anarchism, feminism, all ideological forms and discourses of power and oppression, Fumai interpreted performance as a penetrating and comprehensive substance through which she—and the practice of art—could examine the ideas expressed in all these practices and their strategies, as well as the ways in which the voice and the body act within ideas and values.
Historical figures—from Valerie Solanas to Ulrike Meinhof or Annie Jones—delivered to her a stage on which to dramatize the inherent contradictions in their various discourses and actions, as well as an opportunity to present her audience with the essential integrity of radical actions and feminist or magical practices. Thought and practice become one. All her interests shared three concepts central to Modern Western thought: liberty, equality and sorority. And she exposed them again and again and stressed how, by their very nature, these concepts are in conflict with each other. Her works performed this battle: she embraced her subjects, she assumed their voices, but she also displayed the pain—the deep pain—of the inherent contradictions among these three fundamental concepts and the ways in which they shape and affect the Western understanding of freedom.
Fumai is always described as an artist fascinated by occultist experiments—this is largely because, in talking about her work, she often recalled how an early fascination with Catholic ritual led her to the radical “spirituality” of Aleister Crowley and Madame Blavatsky. But hers was not an anecdotal fascination; it was, rather, research into the nexus of individualist anarchism, socialism, occultism and feminism. Her work did not re-enact the “freaky aspects” of major Modern counter-cultures but argued that, paradoxically, they act as limits to each other and that therefore their liberating potential may be less than we dream of, or simply none at all. Her work was based in a deep study of texts and personalities and often took the form of a dense “writing” interspersed with myriad examples. Examples of voices that report to us examples of practices. These exemplary samples help the viewer understand ideas through actual embodied experience; connecting magically with the different personas lightens the burden of a mere, dry, rational reading of these philosophical ideas. By being enacted, the individual leaves the realm of the “past,” ceases to be a memory or part of a legitimized tradition, and is placed in the present. This act—placing the past in the present by referring to a text or a particular thinker, activist, magician, etc.—demands an incredible effort, not least because Fumai’s ultimate intention was not to be theatrical but rather to make these voices remain in the present and never leave, either from the body or from experience. This impossible effort constitutes the core of her performances. She once said to me: “I am all future freaks.” By this, she meant that she was a visionary in working toward bringing together all these unique forces and personalities and giving them anew the possibility of a real community. Her work has the logic of a historical event: it presents itself like an external fact that really happened and is able to touch all these past individuals personally, and almost absurdly affect them all closely, bringing them closer to us and affecting the terms of our contemporary of society, collectivity. Yes, this is something we could call magic, or a quantic gap that de-historicizes exception.
Why? My reading is that she was searching for ways to erase violence. Liberation movements are violent practices, and Chiara Fumai saw the enemy in the human, in our violent nature, in our religious legitimation of pain. Freedom, democracy and an imagination of the world as the home of human and non-human creatures. Body-border, houses-bunkers, fears-feelings, alienated familiarities… I cannot imagine a more revolutionary act—and I use the word on purpose, after avoiding it forever—than to oblige ourselves to reflect and to love. I imagine the work of Chiara Fumai as similar to that of the mystical poets of sixteenth-century Spain. Closed in their cells, the poets exercised—avant-centuries—the possibility of recalling, connecting, caring for and loving a world even if their eyes and hands and bodies were not part of it.
Hannah Arendt found a beautiful notion to describe this state: worldlessness. If the word world is used to name the space of politics, then to lose the world means to lose politics as well, with all the dangers that this loss entails. It therefore seems mandatory, in this lack-of-the-world, to exercise ways of finding a bond between people, and of maintaining the decades of effort dedicated to extending the social bond to nature. And it is in this lack-of-the-world that we need to make an effort to invent anew the most important element capable of supporting this bond: a public realm.
She was a deep post-humanist. As noted by Emily Verla Bovino, Fumai performed philosopher Max Stirner’s mantra: be “the man and the un-man in one.”1 Her world insisted on human contradictions—our classificatory miseries, our liberation efforts—but was not intended to stop there. The life and death of the human being has been and is still deeply affected by the logic of the accumulation of capital in the capitalist system. Thus her interest in anarchisms and spirituality: both forms of escape. But she suggested an approach based on the continuum of culture and all forms of otherness. She did not have the time to fully develop this, and yet in her work, imagination and nature are seen as forms of localizing sentience and thus surpassing materialistic notions of culture. Ideally, art—through artists—constitutes the substance that allows for a perfect interpenetration between the human and the non-human. Art invents the delicate instruments that will eventually allow for a photosynthesis-like transmission between the ways humans see the real and all the existing non-human ways. Energies will be converted in a positive, fertile flow among systems, like an elaborate dance.