postmedia.net

(...) In your work there are numerous references to an extraterrestrial world, always in the name of Marcel Duchamp...

Yes, I particularly used the metaphor of the extraterrestrials in the Trebbiatori celesti project, dedicated to Marcel Duchamp and consisting of two videos. One, in black and white, describes Duchamp meeting aliens. A spaceship arrives in a landscape and leaves signs on the ground. It is a message from which Duchamp would then construct Grand Verre. In realty those signs left on the ground are a photo that Man Ray took of the same Grand Verre while Duchamp's work was gathering dust. The other video is an animation of Grand Verre which, with a cyclical movement, describes how aliens cultivated the land, because they feed off the energies emitted by humans in the act of dying.

If we could see the world through the eyes of extraterrestrials, what would happen to our value system?

If you accept the creationist theory and not the evolutionary one then you can substitute the idea of God (who arrives from heaven and is more evolved than terrestrials) with that of an extraterrestrial. All of the Bible could be read using an alien key as if God had arrived from who knows what planet to bring his word of truth. The same is true for all of pre-Christian mythology, with its divinities that always arrive from the heavens. As for myself, the problem isn't just about whether I believe in extraterrestrials or not, but also of considering more absurd possibilities. The discovery of the genetic code has led us closer to the idea that we are the outcome of an incredibly complicated and mathematical project and in this sense it is a lot less absurd to think that we are part of an enormous project.

As well as the references to Duchamp and Grand Verre, I think that in Trebbiatori celesti, there is a reference to the phenomenon of the pictographic crop circles that are found engraved in wheat fields all over the world.

Crop circles totally fascinate me. Nobody knows whom the author or authors of these “wheat circles” are. Maybe aliens make them, messages sent from the cosmos, or maybe someone was just having fun creating a mystery. In both cases I think they are an extremely interesting art form.

Nowadays I see an increasing desire to preserve, in the moment in which artists wish for a comparison with the distant past, and they are increasingly less concerned with the major break from the avant-garde.

I have to confess that I am also completely fascinated by the most distant past. I think that the avant-garde with its radical change of viewpoint contributed to adding to this fascination with the past. Man Ray looked at tribal cultures, Gauguin exotic cultures, Duchamp with the esoteric. It is they who opened the doors for a different perception of time and space. Then Einstein's fourth dimension, which the avant-garde was witness to, changed man's relationship with time-space. This is the sensation that I have when I look at archaeological finds or when I walk around ancient Rome.