Letter from the Board of Directors

The emotions we have felt in these two weeks of emergency are grandiose and very powerful: confusion and fear, anguish and yet a sense of purification. We immediately saw a silent community gather around us, which with typical Friulian care has tiptoed close to us and shown us its support: perhaps just by bringing us a bottle of grappa to help us digest a monstrous fire that we will remember forever and that will change our lives.

Those who have helped us and who are helping us continue to point out that we know how to "take it philosophically". Personally, we do not believe it is philosophy, it is something much bigger, we call it trust. Trust in what we have built and that we are still building, the conviction that all of this goes beyond destruction, the certainty that these are not just words, but a way of life. The acid test has arrived - you could also call it the acid test... but the circumstances make us prefer algebra to medieval tradition. A test to prove that all the gestures, ideas and projects of these ten years of Circo all’inCirca are not just the words of an intellectual spoken to the wind of a world too fast to stop and listen. We are convinced that thinking differently is acting and living differently, we think that in the darkness it is still possible to have the courage to smile; not only because we are the idiots still convinced that beauty will save the world. Surely we are also idiots, there is no doubt about that: we are artists in a world that has forgotten beauty, we are contemporaries in a society that is nostalgic for the “good old days”, we are the circus performers of live entertainment in the era of streaming and reproducibility, we are out of date, we make lightness our profession by staying in Italy while many of our colleagues escape abroad... and perhaps the situation is even a little worse than that because we are contemporary-circus-artists-light in Friuli Venezia Giulia! We had to shrug our shoulders and not give up in the face of defeats to be able to affirm with conviction that it is possible to plant a seed within the logic of self-affirmation that is devouring the world.

But not only idiots: the courage to smile even when the world gets dark comes to us from all of you who are reading and have not stopped many lines ago; it comes to us from the trust in the positive relationships that we have seen grow within the projects of the Association and for which we are very grateful. We hope that what is happening to us is a way for you to reread your lives with us and we can ask ourselves together what we are chasing. Are we chasing a world that is now in flames or are we trying despite everything to create spaces in which to grow human beings? It seems to us that the universe is running towards an idea of ​​well-being that no longer exists, towards a progress that has betrayed everyone. Yet we continue to run despite the fires and pandemics, convinced that only by running faster than them will we be able to leave everything behind. It's not like that: houses are burning and pandemics don't stop. The only ones who can make a difference are us with what we decide to give more importance to: forcing the stages, opening gyms at all costs and saying that everything is a great injustice, or once again trying to think and act in an alternative way by opening new spaces; getting around the obstacle or living it by demonstrating that we know how to interpret and change it. The world is burning and we no longer even have the vocabulary to shout "fire". We are helpless in the face of choices that are always "bigger than us": because after all, if everyone thinks a certain way, it is not possible to go against the current. So here we are, to say that this logic does not exist alone, armed only with our scandalous smile in the face of misfortune, to tell you that if you want to believe in alternatives to life, we are ready to listen to you and to start again, once again, together with those who believe in our way of thinking and living.