Alice Malinge : I’d like to begin by asking you about your connection to language and literature. You introduce your exhibition with a poem and you have often spoken of the importance of science-fiction novels and post-apocalyptic stories for you. What role do these narratives play in your work?

Francesco Finizio : It’s more about language than about literature. I don’t feel like a very literary person. I grew up in an Italian immigrant home in the United States. The tug-of-war between the two languages, and by extension between the two cultures, was constant. Arriving in France added a third layer. My relationship to language is quite elastic. The same is true for literature. The idea of the plasticity of language reminds me of Louis Wolfson’s book Le schizo et les langues¹ that Deleuze and Guattari cite in Mille Plateaux² . Wolfson was schizophrenic, and he recounts his life and the linguistic techniques he developed as a self-taught polyglot to escape his mother’s grip. He also suggests improvements for the French language—which is especially surprising considering that Wolfson had never, at that time, left his hometown of New York. I came across the book not long after I arrived in France—it was a providential find.

Alice Malinge : Have you often introduced an exhibition or project with a poem?

Francesco Finizio : It’s really the first time to introduce myself or my work, and I didn’t consciously think about writing a poem. I’d have a hard time seeing it as a poem; it’s more of a rant, a tirade maybe, in the sense that there’s no structure to the poetry… it’s quite stream of consciousness.

Etienne Bernard : We use the term “poem” because in its structure there is something reminiscent of a prose poem.

Francesco Finizio : If there is something to associate with the poem, it is plasticity. The poem tries to make language resistant to a literal reading; the words come back to life, and can form shapes, becoming a kind of chewing gum for the mind. From there, the link is with pop music and the work of the lyricist, who lays down the words and the rhymes. The meaning lies in the way things feel.

Etienne Bernard : The logic of the poem, in its plasticity, can be compared to this text, but it is at the same time extremely demanding. It sets the tone for project of the exhibition. You talk about ranting, and we could equally talk of slam. What place does it have in the Go Ghost ! project? Is it central or is it, on the contrary, a commentary, a satellite?

Francesco Finizio : It’s probably closer to slam, but I don’t know much about it. In any case, the emphatic dimension is what drew me to poets like Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka, and singers like Mark E. Smith of The Fall. At the beginning of each show, there is a text that introduces the scene. So, it’s fundamental but also part the process; it’s one and the same, the way the elements come together—the way I say what I need to say is kind of the same way I put things together in the space.

Alice Malinge : PAmong the references you mention, the author Antoine Volodine comes up again and again, Minor Angels³ in particular. In this novel, we meet a community of people who live in an undefined world, where the stratums of today’s society are evident, but we cannot understand their organization. Can you tell us about it?

Francesco Finizio : What stuck with me in Minor Angels is the positioning with regard to the present, the experience of the world, of life, where the reality lived by the novel’s characters is a world of the past, one that is lived vicariously, through stories. It is at this level that there is a strong connection between the exhibition and Volodine: the feeling that we are witnessing something that is playing with the materialization of memories of a past world. In Volodine’s work there is also this reality that is a little syrupy. We don’t know what time we are in. Perhaps it’s a dreamtime, because people are talking about the world they have lived but which no longer exists. It is a place with a community aspect, but at the same time this community is imbued with a carceral or post-apocalyptic dimension; it’s a bit dark… I’m interested in Volodine, but Philip K. Dick⁴ is another important reference for me, in relation to this split in reality, in which we’re always pulled, between the impossibility of distinguishing what is real and unreal or illusory. This separation is schizophrenic, and is perhaps also something that I can relate to with regard to my own cultural schizophrenia. I have drawn on it at different times, because I find this division, this split, interesting, informative, perhaps because it indicates my own inabilities to reconcile polarities.

Etienne Bernard : Let’s talk about the materiality of the exhibition Go Ghost !, about its use of low-quality, even worn out, materials. In the introductory poem, you use an expression that caught my attention: “LO-FI SEMPER FI.” LO-FI means “low quality” and SEMPER FI is the motto of the US Marines.

Francesco Finizio : Yes, it’s the motto of all the assholes you find in college fraternities or in the Marines… the paragons of a certain America that makes me sick.

Etienne Bernard : So it’s a battle cry. Is there a kind of mannerism in the assertion of this lo-fi aesthetic?

Francesco Finizio : Honestly, not yet. When I sense any lurking mannerism, I’ll change direction! It’s true that lo-fi is as ridiculous a term as alternative rock. I’m interested in lo-fi for its singularities, the artists who occupy the margins because their mix isn’t clean, because they don’t always see the need to polish their work, to erase their mistakes.

Etienne Bernard : If we put the question of mannerism to one side, we can talk about references. We’ve talked about assemblage in particular, in its American tradition, but when I visit the show, I also see fairly strong references to German artists, such as Manfred Pernice.

Francesco Finizio : Yes, but much more fun!

Etienne Bernard : In the exhibition, we can see a lot of references to different aesthetic fields. Listing them wouldn’t be fruitful, but if we consider the work while ignoring these artistic references, looking at it in the context of contemporary societal debates, do you have a message about recycling and the issue of waste?

Francesco Finizio : I’m a little disappointed with people seeing the exhibition through that prism; we immediately fall into a trap. The feeling I get reading Volodine is that we are in a future world, one where experiencing the world is no longer possible, so we retell our memories of the past world, where experiencing the world was possible. Volodine’s world is stripped back; we have to make do with low-quality ersatz objects, evoking a vanished world. I feel like our reality is not far from that. I think about trends, movements, where we talk about retrotech or neo-retro. From that point, we are in a logic exacerbated by the monetization of reality that every past moment is a potential future in the sense of an investment. The future becomes plural—futures—a collective vision parceled into individual visions. So the materials I use and the things constructed are conceived in terms of a material poverty, to narrate, communicate this sense of estrangement.

Alice Malinge : I’d like to talk to you about your relationship with the objects that delineate the exhibition. How did you find them? How did you organize them? Did they have a life in the studio that predates their life in the exhibition?

Francesco Finizio : I’m not a collector. There are groupings, families of objects that come together without necessarily having a precise objective. Generally, they all fall into the category of the pareidolia figure; everything can conjure up a face. Because it is so primary, and is one of the first things we learn, something that ensures the survival of a human. I find the fact that smartphones have face recognition funny, this function that recognizes the face.
Talking about the studio, it’s a place where I experiment with materials, with how things can go together. I look for connections between things; it’s anything but a systematic work—there’s no grid.


Alice Malinge : Do you have any kind of domestic relationship with these objects?


Francesco Finizio : JI think that for a long time, domesticity has been and is clearly visible and determining in the constitution of the work. I remember Roee Rosen once wrote an article⁵ , Studio Art Magazine, no. 161 (July–August 2005). The information is from the author’s website: https://www.roeerosen.com/pagecv] about Guy Ben-Ner and myself in which he talked about the domestic man as an artistic figure. My practice is cemented to the house—the spaces constantly merge…


Etienne Bernard : The space in the FRAC Bretagne where you have installed Go Ghost ! is very close to a real white cube (it is a square white room). In the introductory poem you write: “I am interested in spaces that are built from the inside rather than from above.” I like this sentence very much because the installation as it is placed seems to construct the space, to occupy it, in the sense of occupying or taking territory. You charge the entire space without hanging anything on the walls. You use the electricity to play a soundtrack. You use the room’s lighting as it is. And that’s all. Could we perhaps consider that the territorial occupation by this installation is a contradiction in the use of the white cube as a neutral space promoting the work’s autonomy.

Francesco Finizio : Maybe it’s a positive criticism, the goal is to not be fixated on thinking about the space. It’s not a finality in the sense that the space that emerges through the installation is a space that is made to be walked through. It is not made to be absorbed in one image. I feel like the proof of this is in the documentation of the exhibition. It is difficult to get a sense of the installation. It’s a bit like the images we receive every day from Mars. There is nothing to see until you start looking. As you roam, zooming in and out, you discover the mold on the rover and other details that allow you to make connections and structure your experience. Criticism is possible at this level, that vision is not put forward as the only sensorial faculty for understanding. In the context of the white cube, in the sense that Brian O’Doherty⁶ and Clement Greenberg understood it, the idea is to give vision precedence.

Alice Malinge : Many of the objects in the installation directly reference the sacred, such as the masks, the halos, even Pope John Paul II in one of the videos. Could the approach be described as libertarian? That is to say, a way of having fun, of making fun of sacred forms, and thus the culture of religious cultures?

Francesco Finizio : Yes, I can see myself in that approach. The register of the sacred emerges from formal associations, of halos, coins, gilded lids. These objects instrumentalize the light. The pontiff’s hat looks like a breast … activating these associations lets us imagine other relationships between things. However, perhaps what is mocked is more the institutional form and its inevitable overgrowth rather than any specific religious culture.

I’m interested in religion in its primitive forms, as manifested in the figure of the anchorite. But this applies to just about everything. We really like something when it’s fresh and light. In the poem I make a connection between the anchorite and the comic. I remember, when I arrived in France, I read a book by Jacques Lacarrière, attracted by its title: Les hommes ivres de Dieu, histoire des anachorètes⁷ . It felt like I was reading a chapter of the history of performance art, because it was as fascinating as it was absurd. We went from Simeon Stylites to Vito Acconci. It made me think of Buñuel and his Simon of the Desert⁸ , which draws other parallels. In the poem, I made this connection with the comic because I get the same sense of solitude, a rather ascetic dimension. It might seem a bit corny, but I really like the figure of Saint Francis because he talks to animals. Look at what Pasolini did in The Hawks and the Sparrows⁹ , that’s it. It starts like this, with the Neapolitan comedian Totò and Nino Davoli walking around, and Totò, he’s St Francis!

Alice Malinge : What about survivalism? Is that something you think about?

Francesco Finizio : I’m interested in the techniques of survivalism. So, if I need to make something, I look at survivalists; it’s practical. How you make things, how you can put things together, the right glues, materials, ways of assembling, and so on. I like to look because it’s a way of understanding the world where intelligence is the result of observation and hands. “Thinking through making” as Tim Ingold says. We quickly realize that a shoelace is made up of smaller strands of threads, and we go back tens of thousands of years to find our ancestors weaving thread. In the figure of the survivalist, like that of the anchorite, there is the concept of poverty as a mode of action. For me, this is where the figures correspond, in the stripping back that forces us to look at things, to go beyond their name, in order to seize them and act on reality. I find this rationale in architecture. I’m thinking in particular of Yona Friedman’s Architectures de survie¹⁰ , or in a more architectural sense, of Siah Armajani whose focus leant toward the vernacular. He establishes a dynamic in his maquettes. From four elements he recreates a place that he has seen and gives those looking at it the impression that they have seen it too, that they know it. Every maquette embodies a dynamic relationship. Perhaps this installation at the Frac operates in a similar way.