Massimiliano Amati, Lo stato dell’essere, shared performance around Palestine geographies – USCITA, Festival espanso nelle librerie di Roma

Lo stato dell’essere (The state of being) is a shared performance by Massimiliano Amati Intended as an experience of collective and shared reflection on the geographies of Palestine, it aims to create an artist’s book based on the conceptual and material reinterpretation of an old atlas.
Through the destructive action of the scalpel, we will carve out the outline of the land of Palestine from the pages of the book, obtaining a negative map. The words “state” and “being,” through the creation of a silhouette-outline, refer on the one hand to a political, social, and legal condition outlined at a specific historical moment and, on the other, to an in flux physical, human, and spiritual condition, even when circumscribed by a form.
Highlighting an inside and an outside, tracing an outline, a perimeter, become symbolic gestures of attempts at possible relationships and, at the same time, offer themselves as means to reflect on the very idea of state, border, territory, politics and policies, conflict and dialogue.
The silhouettes of the ‘positive’ cut-outs, the maps of being, are material feedbacks of the reflections shared with the public and will be hidden by the participants inside the books on Leporello shelves, intensifying the relationship between the place and the experience of transforming the atlas.

During the afternoon, visitors can consult a display of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, graphic novels, and photography books related to the Question on Palestine and issues realated to the ideas of State and borders.