Neither hot nor cold

2022

Nominated at the Crash Test Festival, Valdagno

If Nature needs to be preserved, it has to be conceived as a background on which something stands out, and this “something” is obviously the human being, surrounded by Nature. But the main feature of global warming is this ability of the background to suddenly come into the foreground, making the anthropocentric view and its entire philosophical structure – that needs the idea of “world” to exist – collapse.
The world relies on the distinction between background and foreground, on the existence of an “elsewhere” that just like the set design of a theatre provides an environment for the actions of the protagonists. If that elsewhere disappears, the world disappears too: for this reason the anxiety of the apocalypse borne by global warming is actually a reality of the apocalypse. The world is already over.
The worldwide awareness is not the inescapable realization of the fact that “we are the world”, but, on the other hand, that we are not.
We are not the world.
Mankind is 2.5 millions years old. Earth is 4.54 billions years old.
During its existence it has changed from fire ball to ice ball without being affected.
An unsettling indifference towards man’s delirium of omnipotence.
We are neither hot nor cold to the Earth.
Let’s not give ourselves false hope about saving it. It will survive us. We are just trying to save ourselves.
Five mass extinctions have already occurred.
How will the sixth extinction be different from the previous ones? It will be the first one where its creator will kill himself too.
An unsettling indifference.
It’s interesting for us to think that pure and simple survival is more real than any imaginable level of existence, like the quality of being happy. The ecological catastrophe has been perpetrated in the name of survival, of mere survival, without any attention to whatsoever quality of existence.
We need to reclaim our non-granted spaces of freedom, to destroy these imprisonment walls in order to become aware of an infinitely larger container.
Modern man does not believe in the chance of metamorphosis anymore. But we are exactly the result of thousands of metamorphoses that have preceded us. Why do we have to be so arrogant to be the culmination of everything?
Metamorphosis, the ability to change deeply, is intrinsic to nature: given for granted that we have come from water and that a series of species have come from the sea and have changed with time, transforming their fins into paws or wings, it means that metamorphic power belongs to life, and so why shouldn’t man have this power inside himself?


Credits

direction | Flavio Cortellazzi
with | Elia Grassi, Lorenzo Mirandola, Agata Torelli
technical direction | Fabio Dorini
production | Teatro Magro, Alkémica, Comune di San Giorgio Bigarello
Duration | 60 minutes
language | italian [it can be translated in English on demand]


Media


Utility

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Neither hot nor cold

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