Merry Christmas 2023

“Make circus, not war”… for you who had a two in high school, in English it means “make circus, not war”. A slogan with which we wish you a Merry Christmas, a wish that however does not refer to what is happening at the gates of Europe. Of course, stating it forcefully now is important and symbolic, but inviting everyone to make circus rather than war goes beyond the current geopolitical situation; it is our way of inviting you to defuse the signs of war hidden in every fold of everyday life. It is not far away, it is not outside our borders, it is not theirs; we experience and cultivate war every day, it characterizes the way in which we make some of our banal daily choices, it is a passion that moves us as much as love moves us. The ancient Greeks had also personified it as they had done with Venus. Mars is inherent to Olympus and characterizes our ways of being and thinking. So to say that war is far away, beyond the screens of the news that tell us every day what is happening in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, to think that it has nothing to do with our days means to allow it to intervene incognito, without the possibility of unmasking its viral power. Beyond any divinatory ability that science, technology and the algorithms of artificial intelligence claim, Venus probably remains the only true antidote to all this: the very human capacity to love is the only antiviral capable of transforming the signs of war into gestures of art.

Belligerence exerts a powerful, almost fatal attraction on humanity: children love playing video games in which you shoot anyone; television platforms churn out succulent dramas every day in which everyone kills everyone. I often wonder what this means. It would seem like a modern catharsis related to the atavistic thirst for violence that inhabits all of us, only to then find ourselves with dramatic and inexplicable Christmas shootings in the heart of civilized Europe. Given the results of recent times, spectacularizing destruction, war and annihilation was probably not a cathartic enough gesture. It is urgent to reinterpret our world through the perspective of artists, with the gaze of those who are able to transform violence into a poetic gesture. It is not a question of rejecting war: if the Greeks were right, it is quite plausible to say that removing war would mean rejecting a piece of our DNA, which is impossible. Perhaps a revolutionary and unexpected attitude would be to embrace it and understand it so much as to defuse its destructive scope through the disarming gaze of the child, the artist par excellence. In the astonished crowd that does not dare to say anything, a child exclaims "but... the king is naked!". It has always seemed to me that this exclamation is ultimately one of the most vivid expressions of the clown, a character so deeply devoted to his own useless practices that he disowns and unknowingly brings down even totalitarian regimes.

Gestures as simple as they are useless, this is what we wish for you to disobey the logic of a world that still believes in profit despite the environmental catastrophe having already been announced, that affirms the importance of the economy and finance while social classes are cemented and the poor increase. Disobey by creating communities that produce nothing except a different way of living and interpreting this world. In our opinion, the circus is precisely this: its power has always been the ability to bring together communities and to think of artistic work as a collective process, a practice light years away from the logic of the market that has always produced war and destruction, a gesture as incomprehensible as it is urgent. Christian Christmas says something like this: an insignificant child is the beginning of an alternative vision of the world, in the darkest night of the year insignificant peasants contemplate the power of an irrelevant child, who despite being on the margins of history threatens the established power. The wish we make for you this year is the ability to remain disarming children who point to the king and shout to the rest of the village that he is naked, people who affirm how the circus, art and the communities generated around them are the beginning of alternative paths to change the logic of war. Merry Christmas, see you at the circus.