Rules of the Artist – Fabio Bassan

The roots of the stems that have not yet bloomed have been found
The intuitions of removed suspicions have been found
The counterweights of a drawbridge have been found…
And I with them
(The Artist, 2024)

Rules of the Artist

Fabio Bassan

Anna Scalfi Eghenter is a unique artist of her kind and generation. She proceeds straight along a rigorous line of research, from which she never derails, not even when it would be easier to do so, not even when it would be economically more feasible. This too makes her a true artist. She produces a piece of work only when she has the urgency to say something. And she has a lot to say. She lives in the world of art but is not represented by any gallery, as she has found support and complicity elsewhere. She has been an actress and she got a degree in sociology after graduating from the ‘Silvio D’Amico’ performing arts academy. Her education provides clues for the interpretation of her art, although her art goes beyond.

The object of her artistic practice is clear, declined in many formats that range from performance to sculpture to public art. She uses many practices typical of history of art, but she gives each one a new sense and meaning.

The object of her research is hidden behind an appearance of play that allows for more far-reaching freedom of expression. It is the typical escamotage of artists living in a dictatorship. For Anna Scalfi Eghenter, freedom to action is fundamental, and she steps out to seek it and finds it everywhere, in unknown places, or in places that are so evident that it seems absurd that no one noticed them before.

Apparently, Anna Scalfi Eghenter works with rules.

The rules of games: chess, tennis courts, real tennis, the agorà.

The rules of social harmony: from her work on road signs – the ‘feminine signs’, or the ‘right to stop and go back sign’, which not surprisingly is now a permanent installation inside a university – to her work on the ownership of land, or money, to her numerous works on gender differences.

The rules of law: from the apparent oxymoron of the ‘private landscape’ to the practices of the ‘jurisdictional gymnasium’ that allows training with ‘legal tools’ that range from the ‘irregular matrices’ of African national borders that ignored the rootedness of peoples and cultures, becoming the origin not only of decolonisation but also of many contemporary wars; to the public space that acquires an autonomous dignity with respect to being a boundary between private spaces; to the ‘unregulated family’ based on de facto relationships; to the jus sanguinis – jus soli concept as the accidental root of citizenship.

They are rules of art (Fabro), ethical rules, legal rules of a collectivity placed within a public order, filtered by an internal order – that of the artist (as that defined by James hd Brown). If one rests on the surface, it might seem that the artist’s intention is to undermine the rules, to subvert them.

In actual fact, Scalfi Eghenter does not stress the rules to the point of revealing their breaking point (as Arcangelo Sassolino does with materials, for example). Instead, she changes the context in which they are applied, thereby making their limits become self-evident: the rules must adapt to a context that differs from the one for which they were created. For this reason, they must be modified as much as possible and then replaced, if necessary. Because rules are not absolute. They are relative.

For Scalfi, relativism therefore becomes a subversive tool for freeing the mind (through our eyes) from conventional schemes and for allowing us to see beyond: this is not a statement, a point of arrival, but rather a point of departure. This is from where the artist’s investigation starts, where her individuality becomes interpretation and the measure of all things, as Luigi Ontani would suggest.

If the context changes, rules become less useful and should be partly changed. By changing the rules, however, the game stops being that game and becomes something else. We then find that we are no longer interested in the game, in following the rules, in calculating the score, in taking the side of one or of another player. We start looking at things in another way, seeing them as they actually are, beyond the matrix for which they had been created and which they serve. We are forced to take sides but not with regard to a game that concerns others: it is no longer a game, and it regards ourselves.

The artist in this way shares with us her own reality that differs from what we see and in how we live it every day. The artist sees it within herself, creates it, transforms it and gives it meaning. We see that meaning every time as a denunciation. It is not even scandalous any more, but it is quite annoying, always. It is the grain of sand that blocks the gears and reminds us of the folly, which is not the artist’s folly because she is quite lucid: it’s our own folly.

Scalfi’s art could quite certainly seem like denunciation art.

The flags of nations hanging half-mast, their different lengths indicating the extent of importance given by each nation to women’s rights; the treaties concerning land grabbing; the work regarding ‘GAPGender’, are all strong denunciations. They have sparked individual as well as collective reactions. GAP, for example, has threatened legal action to protect its brand name because they don’t want it linked to gender discrimination, not even in an artistic context and even though the term ‘gender gap’ is commonly used everywhere.

And what about the supermarket opened inside a theatre? It is not the enaction of ‘ready made’ that gains significance through dis-location, nor is it a role game, as unfortunately we often see applied in contemporary art, that becomes all the more successful the more it resembles a video game (something we are familiar with and that we can control because its repeats itself in a stable and conform manner). The supermarket was placed inside a theatre during the Covid pandemic, a time when supermarkets stayed open but theatres were forced to close their doors. A time when the only way to open a theatre was… to place a real supermarket inside it. It was to remind us all of what we had beyond mere survival. And to remind us that, without art, living was not even surviving.

All this, contained inside an attractive aesthetic, because beauty, however it is thought and encoded, is a substantial, not formal, part of the artistic work. It is so because it is a door that we feel the urge to open, in order to gain access to the White Rabbit’s hole, the inner world of each true artist who with suffering filters the world and its troubles in order to transform it into something that has meaning and a sense. That sense that we often struggle to identify in things or in life.

With her practice, therefore, Anna Scalfi forces us to rethink life rather than the rules of the game. She reminds us that we have the right to stop to think, she invites us to restore individuality of thought, and she drives us towards common (but not necessarily collective) action. Without all this we are the blind men in Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting, joined one to the other and destined to fall into the first ditch. Or a legion of sleepwalkers.

Anna Scalfi shakes our consciences in a disruptive manner but with the delicacy of the artist.