Sinead O'Connor & Michela Murgia
There is a lot of talk about the disappearance of Sinead O'Connor and Michela Murgia.
It's strange, because for years it was known that Sinead lived on the fringes in motels in Ireland, completely ignored by the world that sometimes sold the news to show us with merciless words and images how this artist had reduced herself. I don't remember reading big statements from her colleagues and her audience, I hope I'm wrong.
Our compatriot Michela Murgia has often been at the center of media wars, often moved by the parties themselves (seen with my own eyes, and don't ask me anything else); more than her books, works or actions, there has been talk of her "coupe de foudre", of her irreverent and provocative actions, which for her were certainly communication strategies almost always aimed at important topics for the whole of society ("society", but what obsolete words I use!). We speak of an artist, Murgia, a scholar, even if coming from the world of work, prepared and intuitive, of a "stage animal", a person who has taken charge of her role with anachronistic coherence, knowing deeply the Italian mentality and the laws of communication. In a country where "writers" and "intellectuals" talk about football and TV series (where they obviously edited part of the screenplays), it is really strange that now this writer who has never talked about football and TV series, is acclaimed and celebrated across the board.
These two women, in different but similar ways, times, fields, have been the "witches" of our days. Female artists irreducibly tied to a romantic and epic idea of the role of art and thought.
On and off, and with due and understandable excesses (the divergent, critical, disobedient perspective, which is the best guarantee of an artist or a sincere intellectual), these two women have been the object of a continuous and perennial attempt at obscurantism, hardly realized, especially for the Murgia, which has remained vigilant and very dense to the end, transforming the cyclical nature of arrivals and departures, stays and departures almost into a "ritual", acting directly and in a very solid way its approach to culture , to the newspaper, to the affections. Murgia has contrasted as an antidote to a depersonalised, dehumanised, aseptic, digital, hyper-controlled and centralized present from the outside of the person, the strength of a Community cultivated and built from within, as a free, conscious and peaceful choice.
In addition to the honesty of living their profession with purity, what unites these two women in part is the ferocious desire to redeem themselves, filling their lives and their work with an ethical sense, embodying the idea of freedom and beauty, as the only transmission possible.
To change their destiny, which had condemned them to a childhood and adolescence marked by violence, which continued from the involved societies in which they lived. Leave the desire for another possible world, work for the future.
I believe this is the greatest urgency, the greatest transmission: deciding to love, being born hated; decide to expose yourself and not to protect yourself; deciding to die, aware that they have not been forgiven for existing, as bearers of a different vision, which cannot be co-opted by any apparatus of power. What was unforgivable on the part of our hypocritical societies was their impact, their incisive, unequivocal, unpredictable legacy.
I don't think that after all the hatred, which in one way or another killed them, and we are talking about a gratuitous, disproportionate, artfully constructed hatred, it is decent to make them now, which no longer bother anyone, heroines .
What is outside the box acts slowly, under the skin, taking root; this will happen to their works and to the meaning of their existence.
I'm sure.