So, come on Michele, let’s get back to work. I don’t think there are many left. Go.
Ok. Yellow.
Yellow and red. Look at that. So, let’s see they wrote to us from home.
So, it’s been 15 years since the debut of your first book, The Armadillo Prophecy, and we were wondering, today what prophecy would the armadillo make?
Is there perhaps an idea that you previously, when you started, considered an absolute certainty and instead now, well, you’ve changed your mind a little, let’s put it this way, or that you’ve even completely overturned?
Eh, a lot. Now I have to see if I have one that comes to mind, but in general I was much more confident than I was 15 years ago, let’s say, both in my life… Me in the meantime with comics, maybe not at the time of the armadillo prophecy, but shortly after, in short, when I saw that this stuff started to work well, let’s say, after three or four years I had the impression that I had found my place in the world. I mean, I used to do that in life, that’s what I could do. Now, however, I no longer feel like it’s my place and therefore I no longer know what I’m doing. So this is the first one, it’s the most macroscopic of all things, but I don’t know, a lot of things, a lot of things that seemed to me to have been acquired 15 years ago, it seems to me are all called into question.
Like democracy! Just to name one..
Anyway, if they had told me that the world’s leading power was acting like Hollywood movie villains, just talking like Hollywood movie villains and saying “tomorrow morning we’re going to exterminate a whole population, we’ll go to pijà for oil and you’re going to pippa etc.”, I thought okay but whoever writes it ‘is writing the screenplay.
Those are the Indians anyway.
Exactly.
So no, I mean, let’s just say there’s a lot I took for granted, that history had already ended one way, but no, even at the lexical level. 15 years ago, it seemed to me that we had reached a level of civilization, so somehow, only the Nazis used the term ethnic substitution, right?
We, when we went to other countries in America, to Jamaica, to England and in any case we thought that the mixing of peoples, then within a framework that was that of democracy, was cool stuff, that is, stuff that somehow had to be promoted. Now it seems that the racial value of pure skin color has once again become an issue to be defended. That stuff looks fucking amazing to me.
Go, fish! Ah, this is my turn. But I don’t have to wear glasses.
Eh, you see the age!
So, your generation was formed in very clear physical spaces, okay? So social centers, occupations, and so on, while today much of the debate has shifted to often private platforms, right?
So do you think this has somehow impacted the new generations and that a bit of a dimension has also been lost, what we were saying before, collective, more collective?
Yes, I mean, for me that stuff is tragedy, in the sense that meanwhile having a physical space somehow forced you to leave the house and confront people you couldn’t block the moment they said things you didn’t like. Even the way you addressed them had to be… I mean, you could still get slapped! So you had to know how to relate and relate and this already seems gigantic to me. You also had to mediate some things, in the sense that even if you wanted something…to get something through, you somehow had to find a compromise with those around you. So that stuff was very important in my opinion.
Obviously it’s not that I didn’t have a bubble as a kid, in the sense that obviously my friends’ circle was somehow a bubble anyway, but in the meantime I selected this bubble myself, not an algorithm that actually works for commercial reasons selected it for me, so it was something different anyway and then the degree of what I could say or couldn’t say, we could write etc., everything was measured by, let’s say, the social legitimacy you gained or lost depending on how you were inside a place, inside a neighborhood, etc. And now it’s based on the rules of the private platform that if it decides that word should no longer be seen, it censors all posts in which that word appears.
Not only is it impoverishment, but it’s just dangerous to think that not realizing that you’re playing at someone else’s house with someone else’s rules, someone else’s tools, that the day that turns them off, turns them off. And then, by the way, when it started, it seemed like these Silicon Valley guys were all enlightened jackass. Then you saw that they are actually all technonazis so in short maybe it’s time people started to realize that.
As if there was no more room to be told no, to be even frustrated, as you say, right? That is, being in a relationship where someone on the other side…
Of course.
Go, go.
He’ll pass it on to me right away. Yes, because I know the ones that burn. But no, come on, not even that much. So, if you could leave just one drawing for those born in 100 years, what would you choose to tell?
Oh my God, what the fuck do I know? But this is difficult. No, I leave him Dragon Ball, the most important work of human ingenuity..
So like the pyramids for the Egyptians, the Vitruvian man launched into space for you is Dragon Ball, for future civilizations.
Yes, I think so. Before Cell to Freeza.
Oh, then after that he got lost, like season 3 of Lost. Then all decadence.
Yeah, that was the most exciting thing I’ve had in life for me. I haven’t found anything up to par.
Ok. Like after Lascaux just decadence, right? After the Lascaux caves…
Come on, come on, I’ll offer it to you this time, go. Let’s take a ride like this.
Ah, okay.
Mh… If you say okay, I’ll worry!
So, okay. I think you’ll hate this phrase by now because it’s become iconic and it’s the famous phrase “let’s love an ice cream”.
Nobody ever told you, did they? This one now has copyright..
In your opinion, it can be defined as the mantra of which generation and why? I mean, I’ll put it into context for you. Are young people currently more of a “let’s go to pijà un gelato” or more of a “let’s arm ourselves and go”?
So, I don’t know the young people de base, in the sense that I don’t hang out with them that much, but they write to me or I meet them about this stuff and I have to say that actually the character de Secco and that phrase there “I don’t give a shit, let’s just love an ice cream” made a bang and I saw everyone ‘these memes and said “Ah, too much me! too much me.” I was saying your mortacci! But actually much more piss than the generation… that is, compared to my generation.
So much more now than your generation…
More now, but then I don’t know because it’s true that even the piss people of now also have a degree of attention to things in the world… For example, my generation has never given a damn about ecology; instead, the piss people of now are quite obsessed with this thing; so, it’s not that they don’t give a damn, but for some reason, you know better than I do.
I young don’t, you? Me ex young!
But the ones you meet, well, then maybe you see, I don’t know if it has anything to do with it ‘this is a speech we had before the Madonna of “I pretend nothing happened”, but maybe, you know, it’s who I go to get ice cream with. That could be the solution, right? Who puts it together. I mean, who am I going to get this ice cream with? So maybe that’s a bit of it. I go there alone, I go there with a friend, I go there with a girl, I go there with a group of friends and maybe maybe that’s a bit like that because things don’t make sense in themselves, I mean let’s try to give it to them ourselves. So maybe the content is that one.
Really thanks Michele because we came out of the box with a lot of things..
So, we’re pretty much almost there. In recent days we were in Longone Sabino, a town, to see the screening at “U Cinemittu” of the film “Non essere cattivo” by Claudio Caligari and Luca Marinelli was there, and Valerio Mastandrea was also there who gives the voice to the armadillo and Luca Marinelli at the beginning, introducing the evening a bit, mentioned the term resistance.
So, reading your interviews a bit, you often use this term mainly by meaning, let’s say, conveying it through art.. and I’ve heard and read that in your opinion the right by definition can’t produce anything artistic at all! Also because every time something new is born, as we were saying a little before, perhaps with globalization, we try to suffocate it immediately, so it can’t create anything new.
So in the small, in the individual, in the personal, how can one resist?
So, in my opinion, this is a complicated moment because this thing you’re saying should be, in my opinion, the very characteristic of those who do this job, right? In the sense of creating an imagination even of imagining things that don’t fit us now, nothing will ever be practicable if we don’t have the imagination to imagine it first.
And this thing here, in my opinion there is much less now, that is, many fewer artists take it upon themselves to do this thing. Now it’s as if even those who do these jobs, instead of trying to imagine new horizons, that is, they think as if they had to manage the misery of the present, but administer, have the administrators do it, you are an artist, try instead to give ideal coordinates and this thing is a bit of a problem in my opinion. This is something that should be done. Then it’s very difficult to do it, in my opinion, right now, because doing it on an individual level is sterile, on an individual level giving coordinates is mitomania, it’s egomania. These things are fruitful if they come from a discussion, from a collective discussion that those who do this job here are then capable of setting to music or drawing, etc. If that upstream part is missing it obviously becomes more difficult. For me, for example, it’s a very difficult time to be able to make social sense of my work with all the necessary quotation marks. When I started I could do it much more and I believed in it much more. I’m struggling a lot now.
You also bring to mind maybe the speech before ‘don’t be bad’, your other series: “This world won’t make me bad.” When you used to say the good guys became bad, or at least the idea of the United States with good superheroes who went to save the world… Now, however, it seems like it’s completely overturned. So, well, maybe it’s the disappointments that make human beings so angry, that then they get angry, that then they go to war and we’re not born so bad, right? Because if you put this world in your series title it won’t make me bad, it means you’re not there.
Look, I have an example I’ve been giving lately because it happened to me and I found it enlightening just so I’ve said it on several occasions. Lately I’ve been getting shitty with a figure on everything, in the sense that I’m being dragged into the middle of a parliamentary question, the video of the politician, of the senator, on any bullshit, in the sense that any controversy can be made about my name, to give us some visibility, it’s made and every time following this pattern: there’s the video, the influencer, the YouTuber who says one thing and unleashes a lot of people who then write to me privately, “ah piece of shit, communist.” And the role model who wrote me this stuff was male, very young, between 15 and 20 years old, half incel, I mean you went to look at this thing, it was just that kind of rancorous pea, and I’m a gnawer, so, I tend to never respond to comments, but to people who write to me privately about some things that make me gnaw, I respond. And it’s amazing how something that started with “piece of shit, that’s 3 million” etc., in the space of three trades, but I mean really three trades, became “oh bro anyway you’re great, when the series comes out I see it, maybe I don’t read the book” and then peppered with a series of things that were still heartbreaking, in the sense that people said: “oh bro anyway you’re great, when the series comes out I’ll see it, maybe I won’t read the book” and then peppered with a series of things that were heartbreaking anyway, in the sense that people said “I won’t read the book because you know anyway the Italian one targeted me, so I don’t feel so good about reading, but I watch the series etc.” and it was something that to defuse it it was simply enough for someone to listen to it, that is, in the sense that these people wrote convinced that no one would ever read, no one would ever respond anyway, so they vomited like this, hate, funny. But the moment you had a person who actually held you up, he would reply to you, which isn’t like he would reply to you saying good, he would reply to you “Oh, what the fuck are you saying?”. Just because he put a middle-of-the-road dialogue in there, it changed everything. And so I’m afraid the big enlightenment is that there’s no shortcut to talking to people, that is, there isn’t… unfortunately, there’s one-to-one, one-by-one relationships, and it’s difficult, I don’t know if it’s feasible, but there’s no substitute for it.
So Michele, we’re at the end of our interview and we’re asking you… you know that soon, we’ve told you a little, we’ll open this space on our blog, a space for sharing, for participation, a little bit of what’s come out today that’s needed, a space also for help (if needed) where you can do psychotherapy, open mainly to young people, but not only. With even more, let’s say, reading activities in some way. And so in light of this, we ask you if you’d like to wish us good luck in armadillo style, telling us that everything will go terribly wrong, but that then somehow, we’ll get by…
Look, just looking at the number of people who write to me with the messes they have, it just seems to me that you will be buried by an amount of discomfort that I don’t envy you at all!
So that sounds like a great wish to me!
Yeah, yeah, come on.
Thank you, thank you very much!
Tank you to..
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