Oh, die Dummheit der Wissenschaft
Roberta Bertozzi

Approximately one century separates the definitive version of Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, a monumental compendium of applied arts and apotheosis of enlightened thought, from the publication of Flaubert’s last novel, which tells the story of two scribes, Messrs. Bouvard and Pécuchet, intent on tackling every field of human knowledge, with perennially catastrophic results. In the space of this century, the dream of the modern epoch reaches its apex and barely misses its approaching decline, without even paying the consequences – these two works, in the formula of a retaliation, circumscribe the beginning and the grotesque end of positivist faith in the unlimited and rational perfection of humanity – incarnating respectively modernity’s melody and counter-melody. Flaubert’s two characters, in spite of their unconditional belief in the dogma of Enlightenment, involuntarily end up little-by-little revealing its illusory substance, anticipating the future debacle of the rhetoric of progress, of its scientific-technological model, of its energetic-economic myth; through their failure, the entire archive of human knowledge, from medicine to history, shows its shadowy side, its limits, its dangerous vanity.

The mechanical sculptures of Francesco Bocchini align themselves with this counter-melody; they provide the backdrop, and they put it into practice. Offset and clumsy pantomime of instrumental efficiency, farce of operational purpose, simulation of process perfection, the mechanics used in these works testifies to the contradiction inherent in every system of thought – it reveals its deficit, it declares its profound stupidity. And it does this from the start by disregarding the very purpose of every kinematic device, of every motive power made to transform, to produce. Bocchini’s mechanisms oppose this material athleticism, this serial production exercise, with their splendid inertia, their passiveness – their being without zeal. Reiterating to the infinite, with sublime idiocy, with disorganic and askew postures, some inefficient, unuseful and insignificant actions, of mechanical pollution, of postindustrial little machines and gadgets they reproduce, instead of efficiency, deadlock, delay, and fracture: the moment in which the gears seem to abandon themselves to a supernatural inertia, a striking vocation, a divine dysfunction. Machines disregard the diktat of productivity, which with their crippled gait break its fluidity, its lubricated performance, its binary logic. Their gestures resonate like a hysterical laugh, the expression of a nervous outburst destined thus to crash with cold groans against the walls of the metallic room which encompasses the organs of transmission, the filiform articulations, the secret joints. In some cases this interior apparatus is left unprotected, the nerve ends stripped of flesh, the capillary vessels exposed – the movement, aware of itself, is revealed in all of its disharmonic, disturbing orchestraten, in its strategy of sedition – anomaly of the body of process, hold-up, disservice and distortion.

There was a very brief time when machines were innocent. A time in which they had no other purpose than their own imaginative proliferation, in which they outlined the system of nature with no intention of taking its place. A time in which they idealized nature’s perfection by imitating it. And even so, in this optimism of technology, a diabolical grimace was already making its appearance, a desire for supremacy, an aspiration to disengage: the automatism of the Renaissance, robotics, humanoids foretold the system’s future autonomy, its future capacity to do without nature. Bocchini’s mechanisms seem to wink at these early stages of Renaissance engineering with their extraordinary candor, their character of essential, visionary futility. And yet they also carry a germ of discomfort, of disquiet, an unsolvable tragic nature. They are machines that have seen the dream transform itself into a nightmare – work convert itself into exploitation, advantage into speculation, planning into surveillance, philanthropy into massacre. These contrivances have a two-faced appearance, in them the playful and carefree childhood of technology exists alongside the torment of its ruthless maturity.

Parody of the industrial cycle, of iron and metallurgical artillery, of media’s and commercial vulgarity, of the statistical index and social barbarity. But also reliquary of waste, of residue not reabsorbed by the production chain, of a foreign body that like a virus, infects the hygienic and homogeneous cycle of seriality. Rejected tin and steel sheets, junk and remnants that are suddenly real, alone, unique. Their isolation from official production redeems them, gives them a halo of resentment, of provocation, of calm accusation in which stirs a nobilitas, a supreme breakage. A redemption that invests not only in their material dimension, but also extends to subject, given the fact that each mechanism has the historic or biological matriculation number it is called on to represent imprinted on its metallic case. One must not misunderstand the importance of the inscriptions, the alphabetical and numerical codes found on these works: they are not calembour, puzzles or verbal estrangement. Each epitaph tell exactly the historic, physical and political realty meant: it is liberated memory, with the list’s purity, with its incontestable evidence, of any possible ideological falsification. The chains of first names and surnames, the zoological or botanical shelving, the semantic associations are nothing but a means of nailing the story of thought to its museal, and therefore criminal, purpose. Emptied of any cultural authority, of any pedagogical value, of any didactic consolation – atlases, synoptic tables, bestiaries like collections of human stupidity – oh, die Dummheit der Wissenschaft.