October 2023 (copy pasted from www.danieleformica.hotglue.me)
Hello, I am Daniele Formica and this is my most recent website (October 2023) made with hotglue in October 2023.
First of all, I have been hesitant and pondering about weather a website is necessary to link to my self, work, practice, art, thinking, questioning, feeling, living, performing, etc... The website- as an idea, image, praxis and phenomenon, etc. - very spontaneously has been manifesting into my life (or I have ex-perienced it).
The practical question is: what do I want from it?
I do not know. I feel like I am throwing stones at the wind, perform talking about trees throughout the crisis, open myself to interpretation, questioning, dancing, improvisation and most importantly in a conversation with YOU, the other -I simply cannot perform alone (even if you may think that my operating resembles a self-love monologue), let alone leaving you with a website that is formally unravelling in front of your subjecting eyes. Arrogant, you say? I do not mean to stand out, but stand within. I want us to get naked. I could be the creepy guy sitting in the bench scribbling nonsense as you bike home from your busy work shift. Would you fear me then? Would I be invisible then? Yet isn't a website also a lonely bench in the stream of public operating, a bench with some graffiti and an empty paper cup and cigarette butts and perhaps a tin can or what else. Isn't a website this latent space, this empty space for most of the time, where somehow you ended up and all of the sudden this insignificance around you, totally alienated from your life -litteraly in-significant-- now this is proximal and you seem to become aware of it, maybe a little grossed out, or ignorant, or what else. Possibilities. Perhaps you came to this bench willingly, perhaps you wanted to find some answers here. Probably you are looking for me, probably you do not know me, you are trying to get in contact with me. Is this the place where I should leave you a way to find me? I think it is much more fun to let this part open. To let it all open.
All that this small verbal delirium is trying to say is: I do not know what I want from the website, and knowing what I would want from it would make my life surely a little more enslaved in automatic operating. And as I keep on pouring out improvised streams of thoughts and feelings on this typing mechanism> you get to know a part of me a little better. Of course perhaps you came here looking for something else. I have tried to be generous, I try to be generous, but also I fear I often tend to overwhelm others, and among all of them myself.
It is a process that is opening, disintegrating, decaying, liquefying. I hope we can meet in the middle, even if the middle keeps on moving.
Daniele Formica, Wednesday 18 Oct 2023, 15:43, The Hague
(April 2023) The Person is a prison.
I hide and imprison myself in a room for the most of my time, and I hate it. But I am also very afraid to step out and be completely torn apart. Yet sometimes I can't resist curiosity, or my libido, and I do step out, and I do get torn apart, and eventually I come back in my prison and heal. Sometimes I invite others to my prison, sometimes they ask to visit me out of their own will -which is very heartwarming.
The spectral precision of the universe (April 2022):
Artworks can, like magical portals, bridge the different epistemic preparation of people in the world (and in the world moving through time!!!) connecting cultures, points of view and experiences down to a single encounter between spectated and spectator. This open ontological conversation moves even beyond the limits of humanity’s self-rhetoric historicism, beyond in a way that the spirit prepares itself to and the body walks away from.
Such preparation for a threshold is something I call ‘The spectral precision of the universe’ and let me introduce it in this way:
You have a fireplace that is the artwork. The fireplace lives on also when the fire is extinguished -its ashes lie in wait until the fire is lit again (Ember and remember are connected by the blow).
You could say that a spectator is a gravitational center for points of view –actor of many scripts, but mirror of one vision. A stimulated and open spectator has probably more than one point of view orbiting around a quasi-stable nucleus that is their persona.
Furthermore, spectatorship is connected to the mirroring of light: you can have spectators that do not spectate the radiant direct source of light, yet still reflect it from other spectators or speculative sources.
This kaleidoscopic crystalline architecture of the epistemic spectacle mirrors the medieval theology of dispersion of the light of god, where god connects to truth and thus proximity to light means proximity to truth. Actors as mirrors take part in the psychedelic rainbow of truth. Void of power is created when actors pretends to behold the truth: because truth, like light, cannot be held, but only absorbed and reflected. There are spectra for light. There is warm light and cold light, the difference between stars and laptop screens. We measure time with light. Fire is our source of light at night. Night is the shadow cast by the sun. Zoroastrianism connects fire with truth. Alchemy encrypts the cult of fire. Prometheus stole the fire and Zeus condemned humanity. Enlightenment condemns the church that is void -holds everything but the truth, by casting the fulgurating lighting of natural sciences. St. Francis, Bruno and Bacon are their shining predecessors. Nature is proximity to god. Nature is zoe. Science and religion are bios. Nature is wild. This wilderness has darkness that is zoe, that is romantic. And Bruno is burnt in Campo dei Fiori because he is close to the light, but surrounded by darkness.
Like Daniel in the lion pit: spectatorship requires a certain level of vulnerability, as spectating means reflecting some of light’s spectra.
You are not producing light and you are not only absorbing it.
And remember this: if you are reflecting it, you are partly made of glass. You are partly fragile.
What is seen is divided in species.
A being of darkness is not a spectator but a sponge. It is more absorbent than reflective, ending the spectrum with a black hole -where light goes in and nothing gets out. Light goes only forward, and no more must be said. Nothing. Dark beasts are invisible when surrounded by the light. But darkness and light are not at fight, nor in conversation either. To some myths darkness, Nyx, was first. To some others the light egg hatched in an explosion of life. Science insists on giving measures to the narrative, so we call them white holes and they are only hypothetical, because light cannot get in them. Light cannot go backward; light goes only forward. The sun grows stronger in the cruelest month, and life follows behind its radiant light. Some actors question, some actors teach, but only spectators know when to do which one of the two.
Specificity is the law of light. Specificity is the law upon us: me and you. In(ti)mates. Passengers. Encounters. Crushers. Incidents. Those who move the light second by second, breath by breath, ember by ember, blow by blow. Specificity matters to the lenses that are used to bend the light. Zooming in, zooming out.
Specificity makes specimens special.
And specialty by specialty the spectacle looms over,
always forward and violently forward
–seeing is necessary and justice is blind.
Only justice is truly blind:
The spirit deals the blow and the spectre disappears.