Why Me?
This text was written by visual artist Pietro Agostoni for his solo exhibition Why Me? curated by Sergey Kantsedal with the assistance of Yuliya Say at Associazione Barriera in Turin, 17 September – 23 October 2021. Featuring Biagio Palmieri, Heith and Fictitous Graffiti Krew (Šimon Sýkora, Junwoo Park, Samy Boudol, Paul Bizkargüenaga).
Photo by Biagio Palmieri
Why me?
Why am I me?
Why am I not another?
Maybe I was, but who?
I wish I wasn’t me for at least one day.
Being a flower, a vegetable,
vegetating there,
But I’m an animal instead,
animating here, animating there.
So plants don’t have a soul?
Where do souls go when the body dies?
What happens when I die?
Who sees like me?
Who knows how Nikola Tesla saw.
How do the blinds see?
How is it possible that someone else sees like me, thinks like me, understands me.
When people say I understand you.
But it’s not true.
I understand.
But then, when you die you’re alone.
And where do we go after that?
Maybe we get back together, maybe “you never come back”, or maybe it starts right now.
Maybe we go where we no longer ask ourselves who we are and what things are.
Maybe it’s like being in an immense room with a giant screen and a boundless VHS archive with all of our existence recorded. And we stay there, in the clouds, along with the other souls, looking at the highlights from other points of view.
Not ours.
Looking from the outside.
Seeing as someone else. Seeing better, seeing more, understanding how one feels on the other side.
Seeing the invisible threads connecting us.
Maybe it’s like in the Flemish triptychs: us, naked, chewed by Lucifer’s mouths, and the transmuted others who reach eternal joy.
I’ve always been afraid of the concept of eternity.
How can one understand words?
How can one not have a syncope thinking of living in a universe that, although infinite, is expanding?
Observing the dances of the planets drawing mathematical interlocks, so surgically exact as to generate life here.
Sure…
It all seems so trivial and obvious.
Sixth grade stuff.
How can one live peacefully, aware of the limits of knowledge?
As if, from a privileged position, someone looked inside a pot full of microcrickets commenting
«so cuuuuute they’re building a particle accelerator!!!».
I wonder if the crickets know.
We should learn the language of nature and ask her.
Maybe we used to do it.
But now we speak, we write, only among ourselves, with human words made just for us,
words made of letters corresponding to sounds.
A
The primordial one.
The ox, the horns, the crown, the high, the falcon, the blade, the plow. Pointed symbols of fertility.
In school they teach us the alphabet and numbers, but they don’t teach us why the alphabet and numbers.
I could keep asking existential and naive questions but the answer, in the end, is always the same since you were a child:
«Because that’s just the way it is!»
It is understandable…
Finally, you can’t have all the answers on a silver plate.
Translated from Italian by Giulia Lenti
