L'Ano Solare. A year long programme on sex and self-display

The book is the outcome of research on the themes of sex, sexuality and performativity which started in summer 2019 and was concluded in autumn 2021. The investigation starts from a curatorial perspective, situated in the field of contemporary Italian visual and performing arts, and evolves by absorbing contents from a variety of disciplines (philosophy, literature, history and pornography). The research is based on the firm conviction – here turned into a method – that a critical theory able to go beyond the disciplinary compartments of knowledge is an important practical tool for facing the political challenges of our contemporary world.

The title of the publication, L’Ano Solare (The Solar Anus), is borrowed from the text of the same name by Georges Bataille, theorist of unproductive expenditure, in whose lines we can find the seeds of the concept of anality that we hold dear. The anus – that “protagonist of a political strategy to terrorise and challenge totalitarian heteronormativity”, in the words of ideadestroyingmuros in the introduction to the Italian edition of Terrore Anale (Anal Terror) by Paul B. Preciado – is the sun around which the system of thought that enriches this book revolves.

Our utopia is ideology. In his project to revise the Marxist system, Antonio Gramsci argued that ideologies are the ground on which we move and, therefore, precede our choices, behaviours and actions. A utopian ideology is the blood in the veins of the collective body, the engine that mobilises and enlivens it, the horizon of polymorphous possibilities extended in a disjointed time. In the crowd we spotted the Pervert, violent, disorganised and dis-identified. We licked his visible scars. He took us by the hand and showed us the counter-attack, based on pleasures, desires and perversions. He made us a collective body: desiring, wandering, erotic, terrorist and sexual, suggesting how we could get out of the büs and whispering that we should become the sun. In the opening of The Solar Anus, Bataille writes “I am the sun”; in the verb ‘to be’ he compresses all the amorous frenzy and volcanic eruption that disrupt the subject. And so, we are the sun.

In the city I imagine we are nothing but a collective body. What did we decide to leave behind? In the city we imagine the squares are open theatres and the street is public property. In the city we imagine we are not authors, we are generous gestures. We don’t need to hold any posture. In the city I imagine, Red is the end, an end that gives meaning to everything. In the city I imagine, poppies and tulips surrounded the city. To remember those who are not with us anymore I’ll see you there where humidity is harvested in the realm of the sensible united in our chants and tears everybody everything everywhere I lend you my shoulder to cry on a whole world in between contact and touch you are the core of my spine.
Il Colorificio

Contributors: Lorenzo Bernini, Il Colorificio, Natalia Cabezas, Giulia Crispiani, Caterina De Nicola, Beatrice Favaretto, La Scuola della Fine del Tempo, Giovanna Maina, Jacopo Miliani, Mariacarla Molè, Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin, Linda Porn Davis, Luca Scarlini, Giovanni Testori, Francesco Tola, TOMBOYS DON’T CRY.