From the requests and reflections that will be collected with the compilation of the Return forms, the collective is composing gods “decipherable” digital posters in augmented reality: the posters of the initiative are currently available in Milan, Codogno, Bergamo, Varese, Alzano, Nembro, and framed with the smartphone using the Aria app, they change transforming into the new elaborations of the community. A collective digital picture, then, which will be in physical form in 297 limited edition copies. Not only. Blu will also create a second public work of art: a “mile in color”Which will unite, graphically and symbolically, the city center with the most fragile territories, as well as those most affected by the pandemic crisis.
The proposal is part of the collaboration agreement that involves various realities in the Milan city area. «We work on space and on the perception of space – continues to explain Blu – which also includes the people who live there and change it with their presence. The dynamics is that of the pixel: a pixel is a single part of an image, represented by a color and a numerical formula, the union of many pixels creates an image and so we develop our works. Combine many pixels to try to give a bigger and sharper image. These pixels are sometimes aware, that is the artists we work with, other times they are unaware, that is the people who meet our work and are automatically part of it ».
Unaware, but up to a certain point. When you start filling out the Return 2020 form, you go down to various levels of depth in which the scope of the initial question becomes increasingly clear: do you really want to give 2020 back? One wonders at what level of depth the collective imagined that people became aware of being part of the process of creating the work, and Blu explains: «People must be able to live these experiences spontaneously. If we imagined a process and thought we were getting people to a certain level, it would be bankruptcy. I believe that this work will have a very slow course and it will be the community itself that will create the levels of understanding. We also discussed the hypothesis of posting only the posters or of explaining and disseminating the project. We decided to explain, because when we compare ourselves with the public artistically, we must be aware that the public needs help to live the experience, but at the same time one must always let the experience be personal. We try to reach as many people as possible, involve them, but also leave them free ».
And in order to leave people free, and therefore to explain without conducting, the language used to communicate with the community is a language built ad hoc, hybrid from the point of view of the structure. A language that mixes primitive and ancient, between the learned and the ignorant, and the effect is out of time, as if it did not come from the past but from a future in reconstruction. To describe the choice of this language, Blu begins with a word: “Ignorant is a beautiful word to me, when you are aware that you do not know. Often there is a fear of making a mistake. When you think, when you dream, when you write. We wanted to remove this fear from people, we wanted them to feel free to write, we tried to remove impediments, walls and therefore grammatical and formal rules. I believe that this language allows people not to have the impression that they are in front of someone who is explaining something to them. If we had used a specific language the result would have been a lesson, which we don’t want to do. Many people are responding to us using this language, with thoughts that don’t make sense but that ask to be taken into consideration ».
The individual and his importance, here is the pixel that emerges from this artistic work. In 2020 we learned that the community is made up of each of us and that unity of purpose can concretely bring about change for all. The intent of Reso 2020, after all, is to bring this unity to awareness, shifting the focus from our inner rejection to an outer reconstruction. And this is how space can be given to a new collective intelligence that surpasses that twentieth-century intelligence that Alessandro Baricco wrote about in recent days, which has shown itself to be unsuitable to face the challenges imposed on us by Covid.