At the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò in New York last night, Davide Toffolo retraced his work between comics, music and Italian underground culture in a conversation that focused mainly on Pasolini, the graphic novel published more than twenty-five years ago and became one of the most recognizable titles of his artistic journey.
“The idea was to imagine the possibility of speaking, through the comic book, to an audience that was not only that of the comic book,” told Toffolo. “We were trying to understand what stories could make sense of this new narrative form.”.
In recalling the birth of the book, Toffolo explained that he approached Pasolini as a figure to be crossed more than to be told in a traditional way: “I was interested in understanding what it meant to put an entire existence at the disposal of writing”. From there a trip was born in the places of the past, from Friuli to Rome to Madrid. “It was above all a journey into the word.”.
During the meeting he returned several times on the risk of transforming Pasolini into a symbolic figure to adapt to his ideas: “Today we often approach Pasolini arbitrarily, pulling him on his side. I did, too, but I tried to do so sincerely, keeping alive above all his word”.
Toffolo called Pasolini “a comic book” rather than a biography, built through a narrative expedient in which a writer meets an enigmatic character who accompanies him in the places of the life of the Friulian author. “To be interested were also themes that are still very present today: consumer society, the relationship with nature, the transformation of man into goods”.
The same theme is resurfaced by the Three Allegri Dead Boys and their skeleton masks, which became the symbol of the band over the years. “The mask is our way to tell one of the problems of contemporaneity: the transformation of man into goods,” he explained. “For artists everything becomes commercial: the face, what you say, what you tell”.
The choice to hide the face, born in the nineties, was also an attempt to protect a private dimension: “With the mask we tried to understand if it was possible to continue to have a normal existence”. Then he added that, over time, those masks also became a collective element: “To the concerts many people wear them. Today there are whole families raised with those masks in the house”.
The meeting also anticipated the return of the Three Young Dead Boys in New York, ten years after the last concert in the city. The band will perform from Arlene’s Grocery, within the Spaghetti Punk exhibition.
L’articolo Davide Toffolo and that thread that joins Pasolini to the Three Allegri Dead Boys proviene da IlNewyorkese.
