Conspire to live. The Notebooks of Patrizio Esposito

Neapolitan, born in 1951, Esposito worked with Antonio Neiwiller and Thierry Salmon. Since 1999 he has been curator of the project “Necessity of faces” on the photographic archive kept in the Sahrawi War Museum, in the Algerian desert of the Hammada. He is one of the promoters of the «Annual courses of video and digital photography» in the Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. Esposito has traveled the world, it was there where his political convictions and the need to give a voice (and a look) to those who are deprived of them took him. Abroad as in Naples, his journey is all about observing and noting things, people, facts, daily moments. «Conspire» was born precisely from the notebooks in which life and art experiences unravel, in search of an ultimate meaning which can be for example «practicing sowing, not being interested in the harvest», «wasting time, the precious good that only once you have. Once and never again, this is delirium, painful pleasure.’

Very often an image triggers an argument. As in the case of Oreste Zevola, photographed in his twenties poised on a motorbike, almost an epiphany of uncertainty: «Oreste is portrayed dreamy and defiant, as I have often seen him in the past. From the image he recalls that there is no balance in life, that risk must be pursued: in hesitation or in impetus ».

Other times it is the relationship with objects that becomes the focal point: «I bought photographs of anonymous people in many cities, I have families that are not mine at home, multiple intimacies and confusions. As happened to my mother, one day I won’t be able to distinguish between near and far».

The spaces we occupy on a daily basis expand, condensing times and ways of life: «Abandoned houses have a long time to show themselves to strangers… We ask ourselves: “what will our rooms be like when we are taken away?”, “will we appear in the shadow to guard the threshold?” We abandon our homes in order not to answer. We look at them to silence the voice». However, the text is never a pure exercise of lyricism, instead rigorously addressing questions of aesthetics and exquisitely philosophical questions, within a paradigm traced by some of Esposito’s tutelary deities, from Artaud to Derrida, from Béla Tarr to Fortini, from Kantor to Godard, up to our beloved friends Neiwiller and Fabrizia Ramondino.

More openly autobiographical one of the most intense parts of the book, entitledAt the gatesrecounts – always in fragments – the long attendance of the author of the rooms of Leonard Bianchi, where a brother of his father had been interned and had died. So a place known since childhood. But in which the photographer has been shooting for years, for his investigations and for a sort of militancy of the spirit that distinguishes him. «Whispers and disjointed chants, yelps, pungent smells beat in his head. In his eyes the disheveled faces, the worn clothes, the mismatched slippers and the oblique gaits ». But the worst is not that. It is the condemnation of the institution for which “the madman’s body will have to renounce its untranslatability and take on domestic features”. Because he’s probably scary. And so, after so many years, in the abandoned rooms of the Bianchi, here is an old photo of the patients taken on an official occasion: «the somewhat settled inmates, cleaned up as best they can, the family members who breathe a sigh of relief in watching the expelled from home”. And yet: «I can’t look at it. The live memory, the bewilderment felt in distant years does not correspond to that ordinariness patched up in one day and that’s it”.

Esposito’s gaze is never fleeting, indeed profound and involved. And it translates into a dense language, where, however, light prevails over the dark side of reality: adjectives such as “clear” and “bright” are repeated. Above all, there remains a possibility of action even for the individual: «Doing with what you have», writes Esposito quoting Neiwiller. What to do? Sometimes just «looking at a plant or an insect, looking at objects, leaving them unused or forcing them» (it happens in his «secluded actions»). But above all, “never claim to be innocent, never, because even one stop nearby is enough to move the walls”. And that’s what, in this lost time, we definitely need.

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