Qu. Let’s start with your nickname, “Good old Andrea”. Andrea, ok, but why “good old”?

A. Well, to start with, it’s andrea with a lowercase ‘a’: I am not I but any andrea. And Andrea comes from andros, hence man. Male, but also human being. One picked at random. And besides, can you think of a more vile, humiliating and irritating insult than to be dubbed “good old”? Hey, you good old chap! Good old whom?! The video is a cathartic psychodrama, a response to the insult.

Qu. In your videos, there is a curious blend of lightness and heaviness, even in the physical sense of the term. Let’s try to put it this way: why do you try to show the weight of corporeity in a light manner?

A. I’ll answer you with the title of another work of mine: I’m sorry to die (but I’m happy), which is also the title of a song by Petrolini. He is the answer, Petrolini. Do you descend from the commedia dell'arte? I descend by the stairs at home! I’m sorry to die is a cast of my body from the waist up, in a position of diving or flying. Hanging from my neck on a rope, however, there is a washing machine. Just like Klein’s leap into the void, but with the bitter certainty of the fall. I know I’ll fall, but that doesn’t mean I won’t jump!

Qu. How do you uncover the grotesque side of things?

A. The grotesque is exactly the route followed to lead from heaviness to lightness. The sometimes bitter growing awareness of the miseries of the human condition triggers off a mechanism of lightness that has been studied by anthropologists. For example, Harlequin used to be a demon dressed in wolf’s skin bearing souls to Hades. Over time, however, he has been transformed into the mask we know today, which is more approachable and cheerful, but has still a demonic soul, like Clowns. We all have to die, but we scared of the fact...

 
Qu. You are the sort of artist who – it seems – seeks to cancel out the gap between life and art, but in the case of teaching, how do you do this? Isn’t teaching a field in which one has to maintain a cold detachment?

A. A cold detachment is impossible for me, and my lessons are often performances. I base teaching children to draw on psychological expedients, distractions, ‘coups de théâtre’, hide and seek games. At the outset, they are a little unsettled by all this, but then they realised that they’re doing better than other classes. So there!
 

5 March 2008