An Italian in Kassel: interview with Sergio Racanati

Among the thousands of artists present at the 15th edition of dOCUMENTA, in Kassel, there are only two Italians: Sergio Racanatiand Elisa Strinna. While the latter is part of the collective Jimmie Durham & A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road, or the eight artists who work together in the KAZimKuBa space, near the station, and in which part of the collective’s creative process has included even the artist’s “absence” after his death, Racanati has decided to tell the curatorial process of the ruangrupa collective in the ruruHaus, showing a series of processes distant from Western production, as an open and inclusive organism that has fascinated the ‘artist. Here is our interview.

You have been invited to submit a project proposal for the RuruHaus, an artistic and curatorial project of the Ruangrupa – the artistic and curatorial collective that directs dOCUMENTA XV – which stems from a completely new idea of ​​exhibition. You made a movie. Tell us about it?
The film WOK / WAJAN focuses on the collection of peripheral elements of the city, highlighting the contrasts, shades and gray areas that mark a notable difference in the perception of the cultural and social life of Kassel during the event compared to its normality in the times when it is out of the circuits of the ‘contemporary art. The film has an experimental approach, in which linear narrative is challenged in favor of a succession of micro-stories that leave the viewer in total freedom to travel in a suspended space / time. It is an investigation that starts from the RuruHaus ecosystem and expands, relating the ecosystem itself to that of the city of Kassel. WOK / WAJAN it is an essay film, whose dimension is often already conceived as a marginal phenomenon / attitude / research. This way of understanding and making art films, in my opinion, is capable of facing the complexity of thought, giving me full freedom of imagination. I like to mention in this regard the great thought of Hans Richter who identified some of the characteristics that continue to be ascribed to the essay film even by contemporary theorists: transgression and the crossing of gender boundaries; creative freedom in detaching oneself from conventions and linguistic constraints; complexity and reflexivity. As for Richter, also for me, it is not a purely documentary cinema but a new structure capable of giving body to the invisible world of imagination, ideas and thoughts. This way of making films allows me to be free so that the essay can collect and coexist and coexist heteroclite material taken from everywhere and his time and space are conditioned exclusively by the need to – try – to show and explain the “complexity of thought “.

I seem to understand through your work – but also through your other research material and which I have read, seen, listened to – that in this DOCUMENT XV it has been understood that art can take other directions, leaving aside the traditional formalization. Do you agree?
I agree in the sense that art can embrace, cross, include other knowledge, other research. What has emerged and is emerging – in my opinion – are the reflections on the new needs of making art, the role of the artist, the silent aid networks, the co-production networks, planning of solidarity economies, new eco-sustainable trajectories both for cultural policies for both social and economic policies. I believe that within a framework like this, traditional formalizations begin to stagger, wobble, disintegrate. But this not only from the point of view of the work but also of the curatorial practice in favor of formalizations that favor the narrative part and methodology, others continue the laboratory approach, work in progress.

Sergio Racanati, Outside the ruruHaus during the opening of dOCUMENTA XV, Kassel, photo by Daniela Trincia, courtesy of the CAPTA archive and Sergio Racanati

You are in a moment of great and intense production, I am also thinking of the exhibition you made in Rome, in recent months, at Albumarte. How was the collaboration with Cristina Cobianchi born, and what prompted you to create an exhibition in Rome?
More than collaboration, I like to call it a relationship. I strongly believe in coincidences and the lunar calendar. Here we met under the sky of Milan during a group exhibition in which I was there. I don’t work with exhibition performance anxiety. I think it is a methodology very far from what interests me and that I carry out every day. The idea of ​​the exhibition came while we were talking about ourselves, we left ourselves to our narrations … I would occasionally send her a link of one of my trailers … We told each other in long phone calls, in acrobatic emails. In short, the exhibition was wanted by Cristina because she was strongly interested in artist films and specifically she was in the trip of wanting to create a film exhibition with a duration beyond that of video art.

Going back to the first question, that of the encounters, to reread it it seems to me that the same happened between you and me. Exchanges of long chats on the phone, on whatsapp, then in person in Matera, indeed in the very hot journey between Bisceglie and Matera. Personal relationships, human relationships are very important to you, more than other artists I have dealt with over the years. This is also felt in your work.
I believe in human connections. But even more so in those free from forms of bargaining, bargaining. I am interested in the construction and implementation of discursive dynamics, of deepening human potential and its great reservoir of possibilities. In this match I also contemplate the encounter with the other *, with otherness and diversity within a welcoming process without ever putting up barriers, walls or censorship. I also talked and drank herbal teas with those who see the world from a different perspective from mine; I’ve always come up with something more. It is a great exercise in centering, opening, focusing that I have been carrying out for several decades with various tools and practices.

Sergio Racanati, on one of the sets of the film WOK / WAJAN during the opening dOCUMENTA XV, Kassel, photo by Daniela Trincia, courtesy of the CAPTA archive and Sergio Racanati

You define your film productions visceral, it is an extremely avant-garde type of cinema. Do you believe that the art world is suitable to accept it or it would not be more appropriate to change the scenario and head towards the Film Festival. You can also tell me that you don’t care about containers, but I think the audience is important to you.
The deadly boredom of exhibitions and festivals! In the sense I would like all these devices to become living and vital organisms. It is not a question of containers but a question of great exercise, of a predisposition to welcome, to confront each other and to want to push oneself into other territories. The blessed vanguard! Yes, I am very much into all those reflections. I am certainly not a child of the overwhelming mass culture. They are perhaps – along with others now a few * comrades * – children of the counterculture. The serious one! Not the living room one! This is how this journey on this earth went! I’m enjoying it all!
I have presented my films in exhibitions in galleries, museums, in festivals and biennials and in independent spaces and in non-delegated spaces. I adore non-deputies madly: meetings of the third kind happen here !!! I’m interested in the public. That is the meeting with the other * who activates the catharsis. I saw the public go into a trans state. I understood them that I had hit the mark in their body. I deepen and always seek the tension towards elsewhere. It is my constant overcoming the limit, crossing the limen! I also understood that it is not a question of containers but of contents and how these are elaborated and presented by opening a dialogue and hoping to create or implement what I call the community of the sensible.

The exhibition you created in Rome was an opportunity to tell you about yourself in many ways, through various media. For example photography. 42 shots in which you told the marginality, or rather the marginality of a nation like Argentina.
I use different media according to urgencies and needs.In my artistic practice I follow the politics of the locus: every material I use I raise it to a metaphor of wealth on one side and the impoverishment of the earth on the other. I live on the edges, on the border, I live on the edge.
I like to quote the incipit of the critical treasure written by Paola Ugolini – curator of the exhibition in the spaces of AlbumArte – published in the numbered catalog printed with it: “Marginality is a radical place of possibility, a space of resistance. A place capable of offering the condition of a radical perspective from which to look, create, imagine alternatives and new worlds ”(Bell Hooks, In praise of the margin, Tamu edizioni, Napoli 2020).

WOK / WAJAN, still from the film, Kassel 2022, courtesy of the CAPTA archive and Sergio Racanati

I also really liked how they were set up, on the wall, without a frame, without frills, I dare say. As if everything else around was a useless accessory.
I hate frames. The decorations. The idea of ​​the object and the object itself. I am on another type of reasoning and utilitas of art. A raw staging. The photography. I dare say post photography. I don’t care about the beautiful picture or the beautiful shot. They too are taken during my crossings. What you saw in the exhibition is a corpus that belongs to the DEBRIS / DETRITI_Argentina project that I created when I won the “Officina Italiana” artistic residence in Buenos Aires curated by Massimo Scaringella.

In the critical text Paola Ugolini writes: “God is in the detail for Flaubert”. There is a radicalization of this statement in your research. How?
I look for God among the debris, the scraps, the leftovers, the fragments that human beings leave behind and create heaps, clusters in the peripheral areas of the cities. It is not a mere fascination but a profound analysis of the state in which man and his ecosystems are compromised. It is a sort of crossing, a secular procession but with solemn spirituality in the outskirts of the post-global village dismayed by crises, wars and economic landslides.

An Italian in Kassel: interview with Sergio Racanati