Who burns rags and who repairs them

Self-combustion fires, arson fires, and then a small sign of hope. There must necessarily be a thread, in this case even in the proper sense, which unites i millions of tons of used clothes that we send to Africa every year to free our conscience from waste and which contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions; the fire that destroyed what is one of the symbols of our bad conscience, namely the “Venus of rags” by Michelangelo Pistoletto, set on fire on a hot summer night in Piazza del Municipio in Naples and finally the small sign positive that comes from France, a bonus for repairing used clothes. Fonds réparation textile is called, and it provides a direct discount on the invoice of between six and twenty-five euros for repairs carried out at the tailors and shoe shops participating in the initiative, starting from October 2023. A small thing, but an important sign, after half a century of disposable culture; a wisp of white smoke, a peace pipe lit in the difficult relationship between man and clothing and between mass society and consumption.

Since its creation in 1967, inspired by the “Venus with the Apple” by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, the symbolic work of poor art had traveled halfway around the world, reproduced in different versions, carrying the ever-present message of the of beauty, of the ability of the world and of humanity to regenerate. Those who deal with clothes and excessive consumerism have seen the destruction of the great Venus, which the master judged an expression of the brutality of today’s world, as a counter-criticism to the excessive consumerism of which the statue is a symbol, to a now worldwide society that reduces everything to rags, but it is unlikely that it was a gesture of rebellion against art, that is, an extreme gesture of counter-protest. It is more probable, indeed it is almost certain, that it was the gesture of a person suffering from mental pathologies.

But we want to continue to see the Venus of rags as an expression of the development of humanity which is not foreign even to the same City of art founded by Pistoletto in the spaces of a nineteenth-century textile factory, one of those terrifying sweatshops on which the prosperity of the West is based; a memory that is always alive and always painful, because when you enter the spaces of the Third Paradise, with the arches overlooking the riverside, the rumble of footsteps is of such intensity that you can’t help but think about what the din of hundreds of mechanical machines at work, summer and winter, in those spaces.