Work and Freedom

The double appointment, scheduled for 16 and 23 June at the Cinema Hall of the Museo Novecento, will host a round table introduced by the Director Sergio Risaliti and mediated by Professor Gianluca Bonaiuti. The protagonists of the meetings will be university professors and scholars who with their research contribute to fueling the debate on the issues of work, society and art in the panorama of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The meetings aim to deepen from the historical, philosophical and social point of view the weight of the message of art in relation to the themes of work and workers’ rights, starting from the monumental work currently housed in Palazzo Vecchio, Il Quarto Stato by Pellizza da Volpedo. The thought expressed by Max Nordau during the famous conference on the social function of art, which inspired Pellizza for the creation of the work, held in Turin in December 1896, that is, that “Art should persuade the people that it is better to be people what else. Better to be workers and forerunners of progress than rich and backward “becomes the foundation for this cycle of meetings as well.

“In the deployment of this ‘crowd’ of workers an unprecedented self-awareness is highlighted, which translates into a determination that, in the painter’s intentions, wants to become class awareness,” says Gianluca Bonaiuti. The work adds a declared desire to build an image that knows how to animate the awareness and conscience of those who, as workers, history has so far condemned to a position of supporting actors and victims, if not of invisible servants.

Starting from the work itself, which presents itself as a diagnosis of a condition and as an instance of emancipation for the subjects represented, we arrive at a more general approach to the figure of the worker, the role of work and their development over the years. Work as an essential and meta-historical element of human identity, at the time of Pellizza, also thanks to the development of ideological-political currents oriented to the purpose and to demands of claims often suppressed with bloody means, passes from indicating a servile condition, devoted to submission to the imperatives of nature and to the command of the masters, on a condition that implies in itself a promise of liberation. The worker should be able to observe the improved image of his role and understand, at the same time, the role he can play in universal history as the protagonist of a progress that awaits him alone. Up to questioning about work today, which elements, in terms of alienation or self-creation, determine it. And finally: which figures would make up that deployed mass today? Is it legitimate to imagine an analogous alignment in view of an emancipation that is intended to be collective and not individual? What aesthetic, as well as political resources could those who wish to repeat the gesture draw on? These and others are the questions that will feed the meetings scheduled at the Museo Novecento.