Tommaso
Giartosio

There is a secret link between the two sinuous lines along which our lives unfold: on the one hand, the apprenticeship of the alphabet, of names, of family vocabulary, of insult, of joking, of foreign languages, of secret codes, of poetry; on the other hand, the intrusive love of parents, the school that is a journey into the unknown, the seductions and dilations of friendship and desire, the bargaining for a place in the world – in an Italy where privilege, prejudice, political and private violence reign.

Tommaso Giartosio traces all the links that connect this double helix, and he knows that embarking on such an undertaking means asking: what letters taste like sugar on our lips, and where does this enjoyment come from? What is the spelling book of our loves? What words encapsulate our fears?

Language as the origin of consciousness and the world, genealogy of affects, identity and disidentity, filter for the gaze, the only possibility of making sense of what we have experienced. The mother tongue and the saved language. The language that is not only poetic restitution of the story, but the very substance of this story. And over it all, around it all, the babel of our existences and those that came before us.