The year that has just passed has left us with words that draw a fragile line. Apparently, among a thousand thoughts, a strange, almost unconscious optimism pervades the country. Constantly, on television screens, in these first weeks, the images related to the first vaccinations: smiles, sweet declarations, the exit from the tunnel that finally seems clear, explicit in front of us. Many now want to understand when and how they will attain the serum and be able to touch the shore of their salvation. The anxiety of wanting to put everything behind us is the new contagion. Encouraging commercials are squandered all over the media. Covid, for them, is a limited problem, almost linked to our past, destined to disappear in a few months. Its sartorial implication is the return to normality. It is a new reality that is materializing, day after day, the seduction of a new game of fate that clears customs for everybody’s freedom. But it is a refuge of the mind that breathes cheerful shadows. The truth remains the usual, dark horizon. Europe, in its first steps, appeared substantially unprepared for mass vaccination.
The timeframe announced will be longer than expected. And as we face new difficult days, in the face of more or less premeditated isolation; art, cinema and theater are forced to retrace the most recent communication paths which are outside their traditional spaces, through new dimensions of dialogue, on still uncertain footprints. History teaches us that after great depressions wars and disasters, there is always, in contrast to the trend, a new phase of cultural, economic and social recovery, a new spirit of the time that rushes impetuously through the world. An almost obvious fact. But art has the duty to question itself today on the repercussions linked to the restrictions of museums and exhibition spaces, the response linked to the new use of artistic and cultural assets, the varied offer of digital schedules and on how artists, gallery owners, auction houses will react to the post-Covid uncertainty. An absolutely new planisphere that will have to be filled with different certainties, with reference points that are fully explicit and discovered, knowing that Covid has definitively taken away not only the romanticism of art but the arabesques of its tradition.
