Generazione Critica: You are both editors for Inside Art and have started collaborating on the Fatima project. How did the collaboration start and how did you combine the research?
Fatima: We have been working together for many years, we started collaborating in the editorial staff of Inside Art, and this is where the idea of Fatima started, even if only in the year of the lockdown Fatima founds its realization. For three years we talked about it, we put down what seemed like great ideas that were then thrown to the bucket. Today we can say that Fatima was born from a need to look for a space where to talk about art in an unconventional way.
GC: Fatima is the newsletter active since June 2020. What reflections and thoughts have guided you in choosing an editorial format such as the newsletter? And what about the name?
F: After a series of thoughts about long form journalism and about how much it had perhaps exhausted its innovative drive by now, we came to the solution that a long article written in the form of a newsletter was the right compromise. But we were not thinking to jpeg newsletters which need to be uploaded or the ones about promotions that you move in spam. When we launched Fatima a new kind of newsletter have already spread, less and less conceived as an informative type and more and more a content type. Newsletter like ours still didn’t found a hole: that den seemed to us the perfect refuge in which to slip in and invite people. The name instead was found one day while, lost in Rome while driving (which happens to us very often), we were trying to figure out how to call this draft of the project we have in mind and the name Fatima appeared on an advertising billboard: an ‘Apparition’, or as we wanted to interpret it.
GC: “When you least expect it, you will receive an apparition in your email: if you think about it, miracles do this, you must have faith”. Inside your newsletter you make a lot of irony about the Catholic culture, dominant in our country, how does it relate to the content you choose? What are these miracles that unfold among the “trips” of the hypertextual contents you have collected and shown?
F: In these times it is better not to go into steep territories. As stated in our last newsletter: We want everything, if God exists, he too.
Miracles are miracles. Once you have had the apparition, then it is a moment to write the whole Gospel.
GC: Fatima, as a newsletter, deals with current news and art: how do you reconcile a more journalistic and news type of information with the contents expected from an in-depth study? Sometimes there are obvious links, I am thinking for example of the newsletter of the 3rd December 2020 whose opening words concerned the like that the pope put on Garibotto; or the newsletter of 2nd of May, which takes into consideration the high number of buses that fire up in the city of Rome…
F: Information collected on the web, on TV, radio, the friend who tells his friend who then tells you that story that happened to his friend’s friend and that you for some reason got lost along the way. And then you start to get your hands on the news, which in itself may be insignificant but that while listening to it for some absurd reason it reminded you that there was an art project by a Bulgarian collective that had done exactly the same thing and that the collective, in turn, was inspired by a sonnet by Jacopo da Lentini which had also been taken up by Belli and set to music at the beginning of the twentieth century by an experimental group from Bergeggi. As you can see, the road is more or less this, let’s say not exactly linear.
GC: Fatima was also born from a collaboration with the Co-Co studio regarding the graphic choice: how important is the aesthetic appearance of your newsletters for you also? Also how do you choose images as return of critical content? In your newsletters it is really easy to get lost among the images from the most varied sources.
F: In the beginning was the verb, the images came later, usually edited on ugly pirate sites. For a newsletter Francesco wanted to use his new graphics tablet and he made a half sketch of a drawing and it worked great. We got excited and from there Fabrizia reopened photoshop finally giving meaning to the adobe course done years before. The iconographic part now has a fundamental role, in the sense that it dialogues with the text and amplifies its meaning and in some cases becomes autonomous and words become superfluous.
The history of the logo, on the other hand, has a different genesis. We had this word that appeared to us and we didn’t know what to do with it. We speak to graphic friends, the Co-co studio, to have some proposals on the logo. There was a very nice and rough one, a more sedate one and then this one: dotted. You couldn’t understand a block of what was written on it but then you focused the dots and Fatima appeared.
GC: Fatima is still a relatively recent project but the past months have seen an acceleration on the use and offer of digital content. What balance can you draw up and what are the goals you set for yourself in the medium term?
F: Yes, yes, there has been an acceleration since the start of the pandemic. Everybody was saying how important it was to rediscover free time. Then we went back to work, and then it seems that no one was able to find him. Bitter short story. Apart from that, we are working on a couple of new projects for Fatima: one digital and one three-dimensional.
GC: I am thinking of other realities that have chosen the newsletter as a tool for a new way of communicating and comparing current artistic and non-artistic themes, for example Medusa, which has recently published the collection of researches with a book published by Not edition. Have you ever thought of transporting the digital dimension of Fatima in a paper version?
F: Yes, thanks to Limone, an independent contemporary art project, in 2022 we will have the pleasure of seeing what effect Fatima has on paper. The format will be presented in the context of a collective in Rome. The title of our contribution will be Limonare duro, just to be coherent.
GC: Metaverso, on the other hand, has once again shown us how in the field of digital platforms there is a constant and dizzying acceleration: how do you think possible developments of the newsletter that from traditional and two-dimensional digital support can propose new types of experience to offer to the reader?
F: Something good has come out from the new digital experiences proposed in recent years. In this sense, we are discussing, together with three curators, on how to send artistic projects to newsletter readers via email. The idea is that artists can reflect on sacred themes in the same way we do, free to decline their project in any form compatible with the space of the newsletter.
GC: When will the next appearance of Fatima be?
F: My God who knows.
FATIMA (curated by Francesco Angelucci and Fabrizia Carabelli) is a newsletter that talks about the world seen through the eyes of the art research. It was born in 2020 on the Substack platform and every month Fatima sends different contemporary contents through the lens of contemporary art. The project is curated by Francesco Angelucci and Fabrizia Carabelli, art historians, journalists and editors of Inside Art.
To subscribe to FATIMA: Fatimamgzn.substack.com
Copyrights ©METRONOM
04/01/2021
