When, a few months ago, Elisa asked me for an introduction to the catalog of her works dedicated to De André, my initial response, mentally, was negative. However, I took some time to think about it. There were two main reasons for my refusal. The first is that I didn't think I understood the meaning of Elisa's works, I considered them difficult, inaccessible. Secondly, De André is too high a songwriter for me, accustomed as I am to listening to bands with dull and certainly not very committed poetry.

However, after having attended a preview of the presentation of the exhibition and the explanation - one by one - of the works and their meaning, I answered in the affirmative and, this time, not mentally. So here we are.

  Which way to start? Let's start from a date that acts as a watershed, as a point of arrival and departure. This date is January 11, 1999. At a global level, that year was certainly marked by prophecy: hopes that the third millennium could bring a cure for HIV, the elimination of third world debt, the extension of social rights; but also a lot of fear for the apocalypse, the end of the world and the Millennium Bug (none of this, these twenty years later, for better or for worse, has happened). The financial climate of those years had just suffered a shock from which, however, it has not yet recovered. The New Economy, with its flavor of pixels, optical fibers and silicon, had brought the American stock market to the highest point of performance but, due to a mechanism triggered by the Asian stock markets, it began a rapid and inexorable descent which, from the stars, in a short time, he led her to the stables. The sound of the bubble exploding stunned everyone a little, forcing them to grope around. The same thing, certainly in a more indelible way due to the cruelty of the images broadcast by television, will happen in the collective consciousness with the attack of September 2001, or with the events of the G8 in Genoa, which occurred a few months earlier.

But let's go back to January 11, 1999, the date that marks the end of the life of the Genoese singer and the beginning, in the life of Elisa Marianini, of a deeper reflection on his poetics. A singer-songwriter, De André, who has always accompanied Elisa. In fact, the first work that opens the exhibition and this catalog is from this period. We are faced with a painting different from all the others, entitled Remembering Fabrizio (1999), conceived and produced after learning of De André's death.

  The catalog you have in your hands covers a chronological span of almost twenty years. The works that Elisa created with artisanal techniques such as encaustic and mortar are listed and explained here in order of creation. Elisa, with her material painting, underlines and reinterprets the themes dear to the singer-songwriter: anti-militarism, attention to the excluded, the oppressed, the outcasts, the last and the different.

  The second work of this catalog is dedicated to diversity, entitled, precisely, Diversity (2010) and "different", as some like to call them, are also considered the Roma, a theme at the center of work 20, whose title is emblematic: By dint of being wind. I say that it is emblematic because in the work emerges a constant movement, a fluidity, a dynamism and an interpenetration of colors and shapes and this, in my opinion, underlines, as today's cultural anthropology does, the opposite of what continues to feed us vulgar political rhetoric, that fluidity and movement are the essential trait of humanity. Cultures and races do not exist as discrete entities, cultures are people who move and meet. The work of deconstructing these two categories is slow but will bear fruit. Racism did not die with the past, it is still alive and well, and continues to justify itself, like sexism, on biological legitimations. A simple trick, linked to the confusion between two terms, that of nature and that of culture. Race makes one think of something natural, and what is natural appears as unchangeable (a sort of substratum) which legitimizes and reproduces a hierarchization whose consequences have always led to domination and subordination. Races do not exist, there is only one race and it is the human one, in its fluidity, in its constant movement, in its being wind.

  But let's go back to the central themes of the Genoese singer-songwriter's poetics, or rather, to the central theme, to the pivot around which everything else develops: man. Man and his weaknesses, immersed in the transience of things, in the mutability of his feelings, as ephemeral as vanity. The Latin phrase vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas resonates in Elisa's work number 12, entitled Vanitas (2016), inspired by the song La morte from 1967.

Here is the humanism of the singer-songwriter in the era in which humanism is over, in the era of technique, in which the subject of History is no longer man but precisely technique, with its cynical instrumental reason which requires reaching the maximum of ends with the minimum use of means, thus avoiding any redundancy dear to humanists.

Humanism, we were saying. Works 7, 25 and 26 (from 2011, 2018 and 2018 respectively) in this catalog are those closest to me: their title is Idyllically opaque, where opacity has a positive value, hides something, conceals a truth; as the true title of the work is hidden (Elisa knows how to do with anagrams and symbolism). In fact, it is in the anagram of Idillically opaque that we find the true title of the work and the meaning of this series: The result of the anagram is Pico's Chameleon.

But what is Pico's chameleon? Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), the most philosopher and most cultured of the Florentine humanists, of Neoplatonic training, compares man to a chameleon in De hominis dignitate, a work intended as Oratio, as a preface to the discussion that these he intended to have with the great prelates of Rome at the opening of the philosophical congress he organized in 1487, in which his nine hundred Conclusiones, contained in a programmatic work entitled Philosophical, Kabbalistic and Theological Conclusions, were to be discussed. However, the congress did not take place due to the condemnation of some theses by the Church, the Oratio was therefore not presented and appeared posthumously. The title by which we now know it was used for the first time in 1504.

In De hominis dignitate, the unity of the philosophical question emerges: what is man? What is the essence of him? Man is his mind, and it is a great miracle, Pico writes: magnum miraculum et admirandum animal. The miracle (noun form derived from the verb miror, which means to marvel), is a fact contrary to the laws of nature, it is the product of a supernatural power. Man is therefore something extraordinary compared to other beings. All other beings have a fixed, immutable nature, they are all placed in a hierarchical order determined by God. Man, however, was created last so that he could watch and admire the divine work, and also has the possibility of deciding about himself : he can abandon himself to the most feral instincts or rise to divinity. Pico's tone, in my opinion, is tragic. Man is possibility, a monstrous possibility, outside the order of the universe. Is Pico perhaps exalting man as the center of the universe or as a microcosm? Is he extolling its freedom? No, he is saying that man does not have a home, that his freedom is a drama, that our existence is exodal, wandering. Man is the possible: he has the possibility of determining his own nature from one extreme to another, from being less than an animal to more than an angel, he is something indeterminable, so ontologically dynamic and fluctuating is he. We can be divine, says Pico, we can reach absolute knowledge thanks to our abilities, without God's help, autonomously, it is all a mechanism internal to man, who is therefore a free monster. Do you also smell Averroism? This is not the place to discuss it..

But Pico's humanism is not an antithesis to Christianity. This can be seen in the attention that the philosopher reserves for the Kabbalah, considered a wisdom for understanding nature and, above all, for the attention paid to magic, an instrument through which nature can be dominated. The value system is Christian (as opposed to the Greek one): man is here to dominate and subjugate creation.

  This reasoning on human vulnerability and fragility leads me to a series of works by Elisa which have human weakness as their theme. I am referring to the works dedicated to the tetralogy of suicide which include The Deep Well, The Last Old Bridge, I'll Give You a Rose and The Voice of the Shell (years?). Elisa sees in suicide not the desire to die, but to be reborn. Her outlook is optimistic. The underlying vision that she conveys in her paintings is optimistic, partly distancing herself from De André, who is often pessimistic towards man and society.

Elisa places great trust in man and his abilities. We can read this between the lines of work number 10, entitled The obstinacy of Icarus (2012). We all know the story of Icarus and what was his end, marked by arrogance and the thrill of flight. Elisa rereads the myth: life is indeed a labyrinth, there is indeed the desire to go further, to think with one's own head, but, contrary to the myth, in Elisa's work, Icarus attempts and then overcomes the undertaking. Icarus, who can be any of us, certainly scared (is it that monster Pico talks about and which we talked about above?), rises higher and higher and transforms into an angel because this is what he secretly desired.

  As you have surely guessed, I was not wrong in thinking that Elisa's works were difficult as, ultimately, all beautiful things are. They are difficult because they are a condensation of symbolism, philosophy, history and esotericism. The hermeneutic task is yours, but don't be afraid, in the following pages you will be guided by the hand.

Happy exhibition and happy reading.

Andrea Tagliaferri

Philosopher and writer

Friday 20 July 2018