Screenwriters. Playwriters. Poets. Artists.

synusi@: e. mounier says that infancy is timeless: as years go by, we constantly need to preserve it and conquer it, despite our age. is there a secrete to do that? 
ricci/forte: The Latin etymological root, INFANS, from where the word infancy is derived, means “mute, incapable of speech”. Therefore, the 360° look is the main feature of a vital period of time where we are precluded to use speech. The development of a sense to the detriment of the other five senses. We believe that if there is an arcanum in order to keep ourselves fit, or at least with a dentless body which we have been provided with since the beautiful golden age, some deep attention (bold impudence) should be paid to such mystery, especially to the world and the preservation of the deontological ideals (open to be adjusted in order to be better defined), which too often we sell off at the appearances market. Perhaps, we start growing up when we abdicate ourselves, when we are satisfied with the products displayed on the catalogue, without trying to understand what’s behind… and we ourselves become samples close to an expiration date. Urban Robinson Crusoes, disturbers of the peace: this is the password in order to be stuck to our origins.

s: a child is always curious, he never stops having certainties, but also innumerable doubts and weaknesses: is the artist – suspended between art and life – a kind of ‘wunderkind’? 
r/f: The artist lives and works in a diastema, the abnormal space between two teeth; an unresolved gap that keeps us divided from the others, thanks to the individual concept of a possible life. As adult, those who try to stammer art in order to create a Morse alphabet, should always keep in mind the child they used to be and keep their most faithful playmate alive – Fairy Curiosity, a prodigious lady who smoothes wrinkles through her question marks launched to the world. Once you have climbed up a ridge in order to see the sun much closer, there is always another ridge, even more tempting for its privileged viewpoint. The risk however is the sunset, and to lose one’s way… but no comeback route compares to the authentic nearest warmth. Darkness, violent as the shot of a Mauser gun, urges us to climb up further on. To avoid without hesitation stories about unhappiness.

s: you are plunged in this cruel fairy tale which is also one of your latest labours: macadamia nut brittle. what characters would you like to be? 
r/f: each one of them is a prism, a diamond that reflects our emotional intemperance, trying to dazzle the viewer’s heart. We too, like Macadamia, Nut, Brittle or Wonder Woman, the four foreveryoung lost in the forest of the adult age, try to warm ourselves, to pump up a rubber airbed that keeps us suspended on the undulatory motion of violence, of overpowering, of disappointment and of resentment, our icebergs against which we scratch the keel until, sometimes, we skim over our heart, the engine hold of a boat going adrift. Perhaps, we identify ourselves with each one of them because of the pupil’s whiteness, even when the ballasted tri-edged blade falls down our neck.

ricci / forte photographed by Claudia Pajewski for DROME magazine

s: at some point, the encounter with your rabbit friend – what do you whisper in his ear? 
r/f: ‘Help me, take me away…’, we would like to try to whisper simultaneously in his long-limbed rosy ears. Away towards longest hours, never-ending vacuum-packed afternoons, without any kind of responsibility. Sometimes, the burden of dregs we drag about with us gets too heavy. That’s the moment when we would like to get back to the comfort of those pop-up tales where, by blowing away the pages, 3D views come up, where we can find a shelter away from the perimetric flatness.

s: a. sigman, psychologist and a fellow of the royal society of medicine, says that for children under 9 years old, the comprehension of reality should occur first through the surrounding world, grabbing, touching, tasting the objects, therefore choosing a natural ‘approach’ with a technology-free zone. what do you think about that? 
r/f: Sigman foretells the technological effects on the teenager generation, fed with the Web and milk, ready to pick up the moorings and set out for a virtual and dreadful journey of no return. Technologies help to dismantle the structure of the man-machine. It is true that with the epidermic, olfactory, verbal, salivary contact, misunderstandings get amended. It is also true though that, like newborns, putting in our mouths someone else’s tongues and pieces, breathing in other people’s oral cavities, would we have the chance to know better those standing in front of us? The level of mystification is so high and every year it develops new updates for the “real personal relationships” software that we might as well try to hide ourselves behind the shield of a social network and being just ourselves, without the fear of being judged or misunderstood. Technologies, apparently algid and based on optical fibres, polymers and electromagnetic waves, can unexpectedly let us discover the live flesh that we conceal too often.

s: b. bettelheim writes that “the meaning of a fairy tale is different for everyone, and for the same person it has a different meaning in different situations of his or her life…”. in this moment of your life, what is your fairy tale? 
r/f: The Goose Girl - which tells what it means to grow up being deprived of parental protection to ensure the development of maturity – definitely represents better than other tales the current moment of our lives, where both of us have been overtaken by the improvident and destroying orphanage condition. In order to be herself, the protagonist of the fairy tale cannot rely on anybody else to save her from the consequences of her own weakness; she has to overcome alone the trials of life. A slow and never-ending inner development should occur so that the protagonists can reach a real independence. Today, all fairy tales tell better than ever the desire to go through the looking glass, no more to launch us into the adult age, but to understand the mechanisms for reality alteration where we are forced to live, justifying the contemporary gag put on and that suffocates our ethical and intellectual culture. That’s why the fanciful world will be the focus of our next study: grimmless (without Grimm) – the theatrical project inspired by the fairy tales written by the Grimm brothers – is not meant to be an escape from reality, indeed it is a huge question mark on the condition of mystification to which we have submitted. The Sleeping Beauty curses sooner or later shall lose their efficacy and, maybe, we shall be able to unplug the TV socket and starting thinking with our own heads again.

s: open your childhood drawer – what do you find inside? 
r/f: Lunches on the beach, afternoons of rabble hanging on the trees, of stubborn liveliness, of faith in a horn of plenty filled with inexhaustible fruits. Pieces of memories, tastes and lost feelings. The smell of our old dreams, of our titanic efforts in order to make them come through.

Trying to resemble what we mostly desired as much as possible, keeping aloof from the common sense meant as a behavioural rule. Cutting tyres, putting off whalebone-made corsets or too tight moccasin. Without provocations or self-congratulations: exclusively aimed at recognizing our own footprints on the sand. Electric peaks of an electrocardiogram. Failing, falling, picking ourselves up… But always with that taste of blood between our gums that makes you smile when you trace and set out for a new and more authentic route.

s: can you explain the sense of change to a child? 
r/f: There is no need to explain it to a child: both the change and the growth are inborn traits. Getting an adult moved from stagnation and deadlock is much more complicated. In the kitchen, we turn on a light, then a silhouette goes past the window. We stay by the side of the road, looking upwards, waiting for someone to ring the entry phone to let us in. but the light fades away and the windowpane takes back the night deep colour. We stay in the street, watching out to not be run over. With our look always focused on that window. That’s the exact moment when we sense the change. Our feet start moving. We physically go away from any possibility of hearing the sound of the door opening; we know it will stay shut, but it doesn’t matter. The window will lighten again directly on our soul when we do not expect it, when we will mostly need it. Achieving a spiritual connection, though unreal and illusory.

s: children are more inclined to till the famous garden, rich in many small/big secrets. 
r/f: We cultivate our small garden in the shadow of a stage, under the warm hug of a profiler. It is in the light behind strangers’ eyelashes; it is in the unexpected gestures; it is in the Chaos of Chance, which gets you face to face with something that forces you to re-calibrate what you are; it is in the endless possibilities we can count on. There are the green fingers of a resistant garden, made of strong roots, bright flowers that bloom only in the darkness, of a green carpet, rich in and moist with possibilities to be yet revealed. That garden is our oasis, the ultimate outpost that we defend against the expanse of sand that dries up our throat.

synusi@blog // casaluce/geiger

www.ricciforte.com

Published on DROME 18 – the CHILDHOOD issue