This year in Turin his Outsider Art festival has carried the Rimbaudian title of ‘Sono altro, sono altrove‘and has mobilized more public than ever. Many onlookers, perhaps intrigued by the section dedicated to Nannetti, the inmate who throughout the sixties on a wall of the Volterra asylum recorded a long story with the metal tip of the buckles of the various vests of his uniform.
Nannetti, afflicted with schizophrenia, was literarily a “rare” to whom Antonio Tabucchi dedicated extraordinary pages at the time and to whom, among us, this year, Raúl Quinto (Cartagena, 1978) has put back into orbit with NOF4’s song (edited by Jekyll & Jill), a book halfway between biography and essays, with immersions in the origin and meaning of writing, always testing the limits of madness; a deep reflection on how literature really becomes literature when it is not infected by all those simulacra that every day take it further away from its essence.
“NOF4”, which was short for Nannetti Oreste Fernando, spent half of his life confined in that asylum in Volterra. Her daily habit of inscribing her strange story on a wall reminds me of that of the pregnant woman I was occasionally spying on at successive noon of a summer years ago, dragging herself heavily along the façade of the Central University of Barcelona, façade that she scratched, as if she had something to write there.
Is writing also scratching? Nannetti would surely have said yes. For years in Volterra he recorded a story in almost 200 meters of wall, a somewhat disjointed story because – its heterodox structure had something of what the novels of the future could be – it dealt with both the birth of the world with mentions to Genesis and a grandiose cosmography (fantastic description of the universe), without leaving aside autobiographical elements, some referring to the horror of war (“The spiked boots advance over all of Europe without encountering territorial resistance”), including imaginary shootings, dream trips, and also a kind curved calendar or chronological time scansion. “A book”, wrote Tabucchi, “containing, in the distortion of madness, what many books in the history of men: cosmogony, wars, mysteries, pains, joys, religiosity, fear, love and death.”
Anyway, Nannetti was, clearly, a rare of consideration. I couldn’t help but relate him to César Aira in Seville receiving the Prix Formentor: “They call me weird. But if a writer is not weird, what is he? Conventional, like all the others. So I gladly assume the adjective and I would like to be very rare “
How many years have they been in Spain calling César Aira “weird” and without dedicating themselves instead to pointing out the “conventional”, who are a scandal? We consider urgent a list of our conventional ones. Could we count on her by the end of the year?
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