April 30th, DC Lecture – Turin polytechnic

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Thursday, April 30th, 2020, 1 – 2:30 PM

Architecture: ENDLESS FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL (C. Darwin, 1859).
Dolomiti Contemporanee – G. D’Incà Levis
Idea, culture and project for a regenerative practice of mountain sites and territories (Punk Is Not Dead)

Turin polytechnic
curated by Silvia Cafora
introduction by Antonio De Rossi

You can re-listen to the lecture here [ITA]

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 - Why “punk”? Wasn’t the desecrating climb enough?
- If you answer, you deny punk itself.
- Cut the bullshit; if a person is aware of themselves, they assert or deny according to their own judgement; set definitions and sectarian decrees are gravestones: throw them in the garbage. Use your head like a ladle.

“… May the will of Heaven allow the reader, made coragenous and fierce …” by the  flogger-text … to eventually find their steep and wild path … or to finally undertake another career, inside their head at least, if not inside the desolate swamp which the two of them (but together they are less than one) inhabit, sectarian and barren.
It’s obvious that there is nothing to justify. But we always do explain, still.

So.
“Punk” is a web of ὑγιεινή τέχνη: it exterminates parasites, it fumigates the carpeting (English carpeting always ends up filthy).
Every good thought is subversive.
Punk came, and put on the streets some of the trash that sat in the living room.
It was time to pump a few bucketfuls of serotonin.
Really, that’s not how Bach died.
Don’t be vile, childish, an ignorant proficient only in toupee-like knowledge, a scarecrow.
Or, if nothing else, adjust that toupee.
Not even the futurists managed to sink Venice.
Both spat out a little rhetoric and weariness.
Be serious, try to understand.
(Good) culture is always and unequivocally an organic and accumulative process – therefore, punk is necessary for evolution, which is anti-bourgeoisie (that doesn’t mean left-leaning: right and left, another couple of gravestones to throw in the trash).
Creative processes (“poietic”, I would like to say: incarnation – in design, ingenuity, art, science – from the spirit’s faculties, which are a much different beast than the meagre professional backdrops and the knowledge stubbornly confined in the cantonal grey categorisations of each individual), if they are real (and not the umpteenth, undignified ornamental showcase), always involve a swerve, a shock, an explosion, an armoured keel breaking the levee open, blowing up in the sky its fragments which, when fallen back on solid ground, make holes in its surface and make it finally possible for blood to flow again (it’s a mallet-shaped scalpel, like poetry: just think of Trakl. Or of that head in a green reverberation field coming out of the fridge – Zombi 3, Fulci ‘88).

We, for example, act the Hercynian critic.
A mountain that still creases (precisely) inside a rational drive.

Our vision is a transformative one, no self-rightous meaning or opportunistic intent for property or profit. No larceny here.
We don’t have a house, everything belongs to us.
We don’t go get some sleep with art and culture and pillow-shaped ideas inside the disheveled and shattered bodies of these depressed sites, we don’t have any nostalgia for their elapsed and expired time, we don’t whine, we work instead, we build networks (in four quarters): we produce.

The primer for a transcormative process which shakes off inertia isn’t a metal riff, and neither can it be found in the theatrical, verbose epic of Queen.
We’re not that kind of stuff.
Our primer is brual and as synthetic as needed.
Not accepting rules (those of system and praxis gravestones which have lead to catatonic stasis, to pathologic degeneration of potential), and acts with the candid instruments of regeneration: the ax and the hammer, the pike and the other toothing sharpened tips (#braintooling).

Sometimes, we’ve had to brandish these honed tools of fervence (for ideas, for what is real) against the so-called Reaction. Against certain feeble cenotaph architects (the kind who spends their time contemplating, engaged in wailing of querulus lamentation, the vestiges of a time long-gone, and the kind that believes even graazing those holy shrouds with one’s finger to be heretical, blasphemous even). A prayer for these self-compressed (a mental erectile disfunction) gentlemen, and may they get out of the way as soon as possible: we call our actionism through rope and cement cultural alpinism: fingers and hands must be gripping the holds, physical contact is mental, too, and necessary (we live inside the sites that we wish to revive: we stay inside them, not closed off, but open, we’re motivated and therefore we make ourselves inherent: that’s why we succeed).

 And then, those officials of the professional species (poor Schopenhauer, who always watched the little ones being shrouded in Maja’s veil, but creatures as little as these ones – clinging and chained to their great garbage-rock in unionistic self-protection –he had not managed to spot).

It is the fossilised hegumen archimandrite of the (sorted, rather than sorting) sort that went dull in an obtuse corner: the hyper-montanistic lobotomy sort. We would like to take up this fanatical term, hyper-montanism, and recharge it with beauty and drive, and make it viral. We want to take it out of history and geography, clean it up, scrub away the foam and drool, invert it, armour it, to tell of a tension which bites gravity without negating it, as it is bitten by it: we’ll be glad to shatter all our teeth all the time: they grow back as quickly as canines in blood. Scarlet Fang (…).

We’ve often written about this cultural alpinism, here are three links, three of three hundred, if you have a hard head and still haven’t understood, learn more:
moreness / l’alpinismo culturale [ITA]
scalare l’architettura
pan gëllner [ITA]

Why do you insult that which you call inept, rather than merely celebrating the Bard?
Hold your uppercase, you lowercase creature, you arrogant lackey; we celebrate no bard: we scale and re-scale the space.
Do you understand how much constructive drive is found inside this apparent destruens.
No, it isn’t apparent: it is, again, hygene prophylaxis.
So, we’ve got to throw away some of that imprisoning garbage.
It’s not really iconoclasm (it is a little) or cultural Luddism (it is, a little).
It is critique: κρίνω.
I’d say that this is what exercising the apophatic function means.
Just as in Kant’s negative theology, right?
Not exactly.
However, if you want to mark the difference, you have to be honest. Something is worth nine? See it, know it, say it.
Something is worth zero? See it, good god, you fool, point to it, and shoot.
What’s the alternative? An (il)logic equivalence, indifference. A cowardly and irresponsible thing, filthy, mushy, prolapsed, greedy, unthinking, unesthetic. We don’t even want to hear its name. If it dares to parade itself in front of us, such configuration of πενία, we shall behead it (or urinate in its pocket).

There are, together with those smooth-headed architects, nailed to the undertow of fossilised history or intangible cement either of the master or the stiff monument on the rusted pedestal covered with fertile guano: some industrial archaeologists, or indeed historians, or administrative technicians of systematic conservation (we’d like to recommend that they, in particular, read a few stories from the cities and the countyside by Moupassant,  Le Voleur by Georges Darien, Messieurs les ronds-de-cuir by Georgess Courteline, and even Bleak House by Dickens, and that’s about it, considering the scatological being doesn’t look itself in the mirror), even lawyers (bougie swindlers, as elegant as a tight-fitting-pants-clad Governor): these individuals who have no inkling of what’s going on around them, and attribute to our good practice an excess of personality.

And this is certainly relative: since they don’t posses any of it, personality, that is, those disgregating, opaque, grim puppets.
We’ve said that we don’t deal with theatrics and epics: with “personality” we mean clear synthetic judgement and oblique action.

And, in sum, so on.