Vanessa Beecroft: «Happiness is staying clear. In my performances I observe who resists and who doesn’t “

Cinecitt, Teatro 5. Fellini’s “house”. And almost a return to his City of Women, shot here, but this time the different film, the VB93 performance by Vanessa Beecroft, with 300 women. Black and white, rich and poor, according to the artist’s script. That she accepted the invitation of Chiara Sbarigia, president of Cinecitt (promoter of the event), determined to make this place built in 1937 a center of planning, of contemporary culture, beyond the studios. With the pride of the historical archive of the Istituto Luce (alias The Educational Cinematographic Union – founded in 1924 – which with its newsreels “educated” the masses by making propaganda), Unesco heritage of memory with its 77 thousand digitized films from 1920 to today and a total of 3 million photographs preserved, including those of when the Teatro 5 welcomed over 3 thousand refugees and war displaced persons from 1944 to 1950. In this fund enriched by new acquisitions there was no photograph of an author, says the president and now we are making up for it. And Beecroft, an artist of international standing, led the way. In this Theater 5, steeped in historical memory, we met Beecroft.

In the performance, she leads these women to exhaustion, after less than an hour, one of the 300 participants fainted … What is the point of this endurance exercise not only physical?to?
Well, not up to this point, I like it when they, in abandonment, take classic poses, in an unforced way, thus letting their interiority emerge. The performance becomes interesting to me after a couple of hours, it acquires a truth, their gaze melts, it becomes more human, I like to see when they are trying to rise, and then observe who is resisting and who is not. For this time I didn’t have the satisfaction of being able to photograph them because I was behind the camera.

During these three hours some of them experienced a total mental emptiness, they rethought their life, for others it was a catharsis, also propitiated by Mahlerian-style music …

The composer is called Gustave Rudman (initially my son Dean was supposed to write the score but he had personal commitments) and he was based on a mantra-theme, the spiritual Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. What interests me is that these women are silent (they are part of a painting), that they are concentrated, collected in themselves and that they acquire a sense of belonging to that group. They are evidently in a state of stress, that what one experiences daily but in an alienated way, while here they live it on stage, in front of the public.

In this team, his intention was to mix poor, marginalized women with others from the upper class.

In July I was in the Roman suburbs of Corviale, Torre Angela, Idroscalo. It wasn’t easy, there was mistrust. I wanted to see if the women of those areas had a more interesting, inwardly suffering face. I remember the satisfied face of a lady from the seaplane base, she lived in a house without windows but she was happy because she lived a few steps from the sea.

So what is happiness?

Stay clear. Understanding what kind of experience one is having in the world, and then that all of us are going to die. I often feel lost in the details but then you feel that you have to rise to a universal thought, I like the idea of ​​spirituality and transcendence, but I can’t follow the Scriptures, they seem too narrative to me.

In this tableau vivant of his, he placed women in white dresses in the front row, behind them, women dressed in black. With what criterion?

I originally created this very nice wardrobe, the black suit reminded me of my grandmother. The idea for women dressed in white (put in a kind of purgatory) was that they dissolve in a post-life state and in fact some have only pantyhose, the idea was that of a sort of circle that expands until leaving someone alone dressed in veils. The women in black, on the other hand, remained there in their integrity. As a reference I had Jeanne Moreau in Antonioni’s Night, a woman who still belongs to that bourgeois and constructed world, but who is mentally lost, who wanders like Monica Vitti in Red Desert. I don’t like cartel-in-hand feminism, a “job” must destabilize from within. My mother was a feminist, without exhibiting.

Her mother read a lot, what was the Bildungsroman’s for her, Vanessa?

Not novels, but essays. The Aesthetic Writings of Marx and Engels. They gave me a formula to deal with any difficulty. They explained that it was not possible to evaluate art according to aesthetic canons, but that art was in dialectic with its own time, admitting any form and political opinion as long as it was a synthesis between the particular and the universal. So with a component typical of the individual and with another universal. For me this has become a rule, so I return to that open structure. And then they also added, contradicting each other, “with the exception of the Greeks”, who with the proportions, the beauty and the historical epos are an unattainable and universal beauty. I find myself there.

And then there was Giuseppina, this special grandmother.

Romagnola, from Forl. We teased her a little bit about her accent. She had a radical personality, she was gentle but antisocial, she had a keen aesthetic sense, very sparing. Always the same clothes and her little black dress, sewn by her. She wore a sailor’s chain around her neck. She always smelled of violet and lavender, very clean. I am a bit like her, but not at her level. My grandmother said that grandfather Ettore (known at 16 in wartime) was the most beautiful man in the world, he looked like Marlon Brando. She had aimed at him as he went to the station to get his cigarettes. Grandfather was very good at photographing, and there are beautiful photos of him of our mother, which I would like to work on sooner or later.

Before Vanessa Beecroft there was for another famous Vanessa, Redgrave.
My father, English, wanted to call me Fiona (my middle name) while my mother, Italian, was reticent, then they went together to see the film Blow Up, and so they decided to call me Vanessa, just like her. More than anything else it was my last name that gave me problems. I grew up on Lake Garda and as a child they made me a bit like the animal: bee bee bee, and then this surname defined me as non-Italian. I was “forest”. My mother was a vegetarian, we didn’t have a car, we didn’t have a telephone, we didn’t have a man in the house. For my mother she always maintained a bourgeois, intellectual, respectable aura, she was not hippy at all, but her thought was very advanced. Her was an innate feminism in her character, she always read her. She looked like Silvana Mangano, dark hair and eyes, with different features from mine. I was clear, plump, and on the street they told me “it’s really true that crows give birth to canaries”. Then I saw my mother as the Medea of ​​Callas. Intense.

Women are still on the emancipation front, as evidenced by those killed in Iran by the moral police for a lock of hair. And there are still many differences between the rights acquired in Europe or America.

In the US they suffer a lot from objectification, giving the woman an expiration date, so there is a lot of recourse to cosmetic surgery. I don’t like to work artistically with people who have done these interventions, I find them all the same, they have a face that is not human, and I don’t care. I always look for figures with an autobiographical reference. The proportion of the face. I like naked people. Then, in America, I find there is a certain aggressiveness in women, many speak with guttural voices, a pity because they lose some qualities of the feminine that I like.

What is life like in Los Angeles? Many stars and also a beautiful art scene.
Rather monastic. I don’t have a personal trainer, I’m focused on my work. My house under the Hollywood sign. Under my house there are many poor families, almost an apocalyptic epidemic. And then the distances are great for socializing and meeting people. I live there because my two ex-husbands are there. I have four children, two are studying, one at the university in Boston and the other in New York, and two other little ones. I also wanted ten, I’ve never been afraid of body transformation. I’ve been nursing them all for four years. Motherhood is fundamental for me.

Kanye West asked her to give advice to his wife Kim Kardashian, to make her more elegant. What did he fix in her?

I give a general aesthetic line (indirectly, through him) based on purity, on minimalism, on color tables, not taking care of the details, eliminating the vulgarity of a new rich American, to make it more European, more minimal. I suggested dressing Saint-Laurent and Alaa. She, to create her intimate line Skims of constrictors, was inspired by the aesthetics of my images, a Polaroid of mine made with Jeffrey Deitch at the Dia Foundation, in which women used these cut tights. My mother, at home, sometimes put stockings on her head so as not to dirty her clothes with make-up, wearing them. From there comes my idea of ​​nudity.

Palermo, his city of the heart. In December he will be there with a project at Palazzo Abatellis, centered on the fifteenth-century sculptures by Laurana.

Laurana’s works, of ascetic beauty, have a contemporary simplification. I “took” these heads and magnified them.