OUR GREAT FUTURE

120X40 cm

Water, alabaster chalk, ashes from burned delivery boxes.

Statuesque and tedious, this bottle warns us: where is our awareness? Where have we left our care, empathy, affection, far-sightedness and respect, details that characterise the human species? How do we want to nourish in soul, body and heart our future born? Do we really need new births?

Our species’ tender earthly need for constant reproduction seems redundant and habitual to me.

To my simple and (perhaps too -little-) ‘simplifying’ eyes, the real problem is that we feel obliged to occupy this Earth of ours out of eagerness for control and selfishness, suffocating it with our superficial conceit that we are the most advanced species, the most deserving to occupy every hole left vacant by our greedy touch, the principal and necessary species par excellence. The vanity of creating a being similar to oneself in order to educate it in one’s own image and likeness almost unsettles me.

And so it has been for centuries and the population grows without stopping. Every day, every twenty-four hours an average of 237,000 human beings are born – one every 4.2 seconds – and about 140,000 die. This means that 97,000 more people live on Earth every day.

How do we react to this information? I know, these numbers are so high that they seem unreal and distant. How much weight our mother earth has to bear, how much support she gives us every day… I have to say that this romantic streak of mine does not bother me, after all, worrying about the environment is very fashionable nowadays.

I often tell myself, “that’s an absurd and inhuman thought” but I can’t stop questioning why we continue to feel the need to reproduce when it is so inevitably clear that with our numbers we are destroying the planet.

Why, I ask, not take care of what already exists? Is it perhaps the desire to feel that we are creators of something – other – like ourselves? To feel that shadowy feeling of satisfaction that one gets when one is the protagonist of a new event? Sure, it is natural, biological, human, the need to give birth to love, a new life, a new brain, a new mind and mentality, but to what end? On what terms, then, will this new little beginning of life be left? Where is still the ancient covenant between human being and Nature when we are clearly the cause of the breaking of this fundamental bond?  The smell of burning sometimes reminds us that some ‘amazon is burning’ and thus reinforces our feeling of comfort when we think how happy we are in our homes, far away from everything and everyone.

What kind of system is this? Justice, injustice, we don’t even know the difference anymore, blindness and indifference…. A beautiful soup of general disinterest, overloaded with information, hyper-connected lives, ocean of images and hunger for money.

Could it perhaps be a solution to our doubts to plug holes by procreating?

“What holes is this one about?” Of questions so important and gigantic that the answers are so obvious and mysterious at the same time, but which above all WE DON’T WANT TO SEE.

We are free to decide whether or not to expand our family tree, of course, but I believe it is of paramount importance not to neglect at least the education and values we want to pass on to those who will inhabit our wounded planet after us.

Here then, ladies and gentlemen, from the good fertile mother’s milk that our Earth still gives us, the ashes of a time past and present, the result of the fire of the irrepressible passion for waste, exploitation, the need for the new and the better… here is a great symbol of peace, of hope, of a vague future that succumbs to our lives, but also of a romantic cynicism that guides our grimaces as soon as we hear the usual classic activist phrases.

Mother’s milk of an exploited mother and capitalist ashes. Can you smell it?

What are we going to do? Will we ever consider the gesture of ‘feeding’ also as a metaphor for the transmission of true awareness, of knowledge, of well-founded information?

Grey truth or blindness forever?

ps: But most of all, I am really sorry for our mind-set, because we had the nerve to call this world – destruction, progress.