It is dedicated to the end of life on KUM! Festival which from Friday 14 to Sunday 16 October returns to Mole Vanvitelliana of Ancona. The manifestation directed by the psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati with the scientific coordination of the philosopher Federico Leoni, also this year it is ready to give life to a constructive and polyphonic dialogue on the care of oneself, of the other and of the fragile and wounded world we live in.
“The end of life is still a moment in life, a passage in which it is possible to make something of oneself, an occasion in which to give testimony of an existence and to collect the voice of those who accompanied and accompanies it.»Declare Massimo Recalcati and Federico Leoni. “This is why the time of the end is an enigmatic time, it opens ethical questions, shakes politics, divides public opinion, arouses legal disputes, questions medical practices and scientific knowledge, challenges the answers of the most ancient religious traditions”.
The festival maintains the project of being a common construction context: hence the subtitle Construction sites, born last year, in the time of the pandemic, to emphasize the urgency of forging tools suitable for overcoming the difficulties of the present, giving concrete answers to real problems, pushing us to act and not just to reflect.
This active vocation is combined with the native spirit of the event contained in its name. Kum! is the imperative that God addresses to Jonah and Jesus to Lazarus: Get up! An invitation to move, restart, renew. In any direction you look today, from school to economy, from culture to health, from institutions to ecology, there is a need to open a space for unscrupulous experimentation, a workshop, a place where consolidated ideas and practices are put to the test of the unforeseen needs of an interrogation and restart time.
On the calendar, in the three days of the festival, 57 guests for 42 meetings, between Lectio with great exponents of psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature and science; Dialogues and Conversations to deepen different ideas and points of view; Portraits of important figures of Western culture; Visions to explore the 2022 theme also through cinema; and moments of conversation around a tea or an aperitif with young speakers who take their cue from great figures of poetry and literature to address the key themes of psychoanalysis in Psychology from you and Aperipsì.
And again Special events including the representation of Amen, the first theatrical text by Massimo Recalcati, staged for the first time in Ancona; the meeting between the director of the festival and the actor and director Kim Rossi Stuart previewing his new film Brado; Die from laughing by Moni Ovadia; and the appointment that closes the event with the poetess Mariangela Gualtieri and her sound ritual on the theme of mourning.
The journalist and writer opens the festival Francesca Mannocchi that, interviewed by the columnist Marianna Aprile, tells about his relationship with the disease and the risk that anyone who gets sick runs: that of identifying with their own illness and living forever feeling like a victim.
Lectio magistralis
The most disconcerting discovery of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, is that destructive and self-destructive drive at the heart of the human experience he dubbed the “death drive”. How can the reference to death imply the life force of the drive? With the festival director Massimo Recalcati we explore the meaning and importance of an essential intuition for the human being and the practice of psychoanalysis. Life and death as seen by writers and philosophers: Antonio Moresco tells the festival, as already in the pages of his latest books, the extreme ridge of life and death, which are not two mirror opposites on the same horizontal line, but appear embraced. Rosella Postorinostarting with his novel The tasters in which she was inspired by the true story of Margot Wölk, Hitler’s taster – she bears an unavoidable testimony on the themes of war, love, death and hunger for life that prevent us from accepting the end. According to Alcmeon of Crotone, a Pythagorean physician and philosopher, men die because they do not know how to connect the beginning with the end. Instead, thought should learn to recognize destiny in the disconnected signs we see: the philosopher speaks of it Rocco Ronchi with an excursus into the thought of great philosophers including Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson.
From literature to science with the physicist Guido Tonelli and a question still unanswered: And what will happen to our universe?
Several Dialogues are also scheduled. According to the sociologist Luigi Manconi And Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, before investigating every possible choice on the end of life, a fundamental question must be resolved: Whose is my life? Together they present us with two distant worldviews, yet destined for confrontation: one profoundly religious and linked to the idea that something greater has the last word on life and its end; the other secular, certain that life belongs only to the individual who lives it, for better or for worse.
To the question par excellence What sense in the end? they try to give an answer Father Guidalberto Bormolini And Don Luigi Epicoco. For decades we have avoided confronting pain because we are unable to explain it to ourselves and ask ourselves what is after death for fear of the unknown. But only the assumption of our mortality allows for an ethics. Only the awareness of death opens up to the mystery, gives value to the everyday, resizes the ephemeral. Death is not the opposite of life, it is indeed an open door to life. The journalist and writer moderates the dialogue Antonio Sanfrancesco.
What to do with what’s left of us? To answer are Ingrid Paoletti, expert in architecture technology at the Politecnico di Milano, e Federico Leoni. From the planet to the city, to our homes, we must learn to enhance and give new life to waste, to discarded things, to abandoned spaces. What we have inherited from the past serves to create the future: this relationship is perhaps the only possible definition of what we call ethics.
A real duet is planned between the philosopher and thanatologist Ines Testoni and the physical Federico Faggin, fifty years ago inventor of the first microprocessor. Together they try to reinterpret the laws of nature in the light of a scientific and rationalist gaze to leave behind the nihilistic vision of death. Adolescence, a time of death and transformation: we leave our childhood behind and look out over the still enigmatic landscape of adulthood. And, as someone said, it is in the time when the past sets and the future struggles to be born that monsters multiply. Show that psychoanalysts Marisa Fiumanò And Uberto Zuccardi they teach us to know and understand. Can feelings, like objects, also fall into disuse?
In the meeting When a love ends psychoanalysts Mariela Castrillejo and Aldo Becce they turn to poetry, cinema, theater, painting and photography to find metaphorical representations of broken loves, a lack that sometimes opens up on our path. The art critic Elio Grazioli and the philosopher Riccardo Panattoni in The good use of the end, starting with a selection of the latest works by famous artists, shed light on the latter’s attempts to circumvent death. Because when the end approaches, the only thing to do is a work of art.
The psychotherapist Monica Farinelli and the psychoanalyst Maurizio Balsamo they point out The importance of the name. The name identifies us and guarantees an armor against the fragility of existence. The end, however, makes every protective screen waver. To face it, it is necessary to change perspective and understand death as a movement towards something new. The counselor Laura Campanello and Augusto Caracenidirector of the Complex Structure of Palliative Care, Pain Therapy and Rehabilitation of the IRCCS Foundation, tell how the medical clinic in hospices takes care of the body as well as the psyche, relationships and spirituality of the patient to alleviate suffering, respecting the meaning deeper that this takes on for each one.
The Kum! Massimo Recalcati’s Festival questions the end of life