QUALCOSA NASCERÀ DA NOI

FIRST LETTER

“First of all I should tell you about my life here. At this age a person can write a manifesto, now and not in the flush of youth, and try to pinpoint the exact moment when their real life happened. I came to work on the city, but everything in the city was already settled and nothing in me was settled. So I focused on you. I focused on the story we’d left half-finished more than 30 years earlier. I started waking up before everybody else. And building my cage. And every day at 6 a.m. I’d go to the Sant’ Anselmo monastery to pray with the monks. And then have breakfast at Calisto. And then read Pound’s Cantos. And then cook rice and endive. And then attempt to decipher the Roman sky.
I am 60 years old and writing my manifesto—60 years old and only just beginning. If I had a great life story to tell and had to write a book, do you think I should focus on that great story or on the anodyne days of that life, on the daily struggle against the hours, against sadness, against time? Which is more interesting and important at this point, our empty hours or my singular story? We always think we’ll be able to transform ourselves completely. I used to tell myself life’s what matters and you don’t know how to live. And still I wonder, how willing am I to stray from the path?”


(...)

 
“In Qualcosa nascerà da noi (Something Will Be Born of Us) there is a drive and a power that sets out from desire, from the language of desire, from desiring. All the text’s straying and detouring, all that the writers of that complex correspondence say to each other, has to do with a desire that inevitably changes course, almost mystical, almost religious, a theological contemplation of desire.”

Pedro G. Romero






QUALCOSA NASCERÀ DA NOI [SOMETHING WILL BE BORN OF US]

A performance by Pablo Fidalgo
With Juan Loriente
Producer and assistant director: Amalia Area
Video and photographic documentation: Vicente Vázquez
Artistic collaboration: Anna Talens
Translation: Andrea Rosenberg
Photography: Luis Nocete
Special thanks to: Teresa Guerra, Pedro G. Romero

This project was developed with the support of the Becas MAEC-AECID de Arte, Educación y Cultura for the 2018–2019 academic year as part of the grant program sponsored by the Real Academia de España en Roma.