The work will not be given back
Presentation of the works in a catalogue,
which will be sent to all participants 2012
Delivery deadline 31 december 2012
All the works must be sent to:
ART GALLERY ATREBATES Via Dè Amicis 35/37 4060 Dozza (BO) IT www.atrebates.net
PAPER TAKES FIRE AT 451° F: 1 LESS DEGREE TO SAVE BOOKS AND CULTURE FROM BURNING...
During the Thirties and Forties, two great prophets of the 20th century, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, had proposed dystopian worlds, built around the ‘information degenerations’ of totalitarian regimes. Ray Bradbury focuses on the same degeneration in a regime (apparently democratic) based on an increasingly pervasive mass consumption, imagining a future, after 1960, in which reading books is a crime.
A special corps of firefighters has the task of tracing the perpetrators of the ‘crime of reading’ and burn their books. The law-abiding citizens must use the television in order to live, happily conditioned, outside of any unnecessary (and misleading) form of communication. Television, obsessive component of that society, is used to define what is right and what is wrong. However, there is a group of men who, together with their companions exiled from society and scattered throughout the nation, are the literary memory of mankind, as they have memorized the great classical texts of all times, that they ‘tell’ and ‘transmit’ to younger generations.
If Huxley and, above all, Orwell did not leave any way of escape, Bradbury’s book’s ending is open to a new life and to hope. Now that the television medium, even with its heavy anesthetic power, appears to be almost obsolete in comparison to the proliferation of all-pervasive and pseudo- communicative electronic media, his fears seem more urgent than ever and hopes fainter and fainter.
Carmelo Giummo
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