“The sandwich man”
By
Piero Bortoli

I presented a live Art happening at the Liverpool Town Hall for the inauguration of the Liverpool Biennial 2004.

With my performance I transformed my self into a sandwich man to propagate Art like as if it were a commercial business and how the system of the economic god tells the people what to do.

By using the concept of the sandwich man and materialistic point of view like “Time is Money” and original design clocks made in Murano glass, on the other positive side using rice and the Buddhist Philosophy.

Human beings have two kinds of treasure. One is clothing and the other is food. A sutra states, "Sentient beings live in dependence on food."' This passage means that living beings dwell in this world owing to food and clothing. Fish dwell in water and regard water as their treasure. Trees grow on the earth and regard the earth as their treasure. Human beings have life owing to food, and regard food as their treasure.

Life is the foremost of all treasures. It is expounded that even the treasures of the entire major world system cannot equal the value of one's body and life. Even the treasures that fill the major world system are no substitute for life. Life is like a lamp, and food is like oil. When the oil is exhausted, the lamp goes out, and without food, life will cease.

In accordance with their status, some have wives and children, relatives, fiefs, and gold and silver, while others have no treasure. Whether one has wealth or not, no treasure exceeds the one called life. Ultimately, "earnest resolve" is what makes offering, or almsgiving, in Buddhism a meaningful act. The Daishonin* thus equates the polished rice he has received to life itself.

* From: THE MAJOR WRITINGS OF NICHIREN DAISHONIN vol.1

2003 ”Marghera-Venezia-New York” Biennale di Venezia International Visual Art Exhibition. Venice Italy (collaboration-work)Archi-Sculpture, Installation.

Commissioned by the Venice City Council, Veneto Region and produced by the Marghera-Venice-New York Association, "it represents the bell tower of St Mark's contained in the interior of the Metropolitan Life Tower of New York" - as the inscription placed at the foot of the structure states.

Click here for more

The Humanity Carpet
By Piero Bortoli

Venice Biennial 2001; Liverpool Biennial 2002; Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool, 2004; Unity Theatre, Liverpool, 2004

The Humanity carpet is made up of 80 jute sacks (80cm x 40 cm each), previously used to transport coffee from developing countries to the Lombardo Veneto (LoVe) Coffee Company in Venice. They have been sewn together by hand, and bear the slogans “Benvegnudi a el Tapeo de el Omo” and “Welcome to the Humanity Carpet.”

The Tapeo de el Omo is a super hero among carpets. It crosses oceans, speaks in various tongues, and finds its mission according to where it’s at. On its first appearance at the Venice Biennale 2001, it lay irreverently across the main thoroughfare. Like the disinfectant footbaths in a public swimming pool, it had to be crossed to reach the art. A frustrated outcry at the course to be run to reach the vitrines of the monied art markets, too well known by those in the know, too long sweated over in fear by those outside the name-fame-money game to go into.

At Liverpool’s Unity Theatre, on 6 April 2004, while UK’s Glastonbury festival revved up, and guerrilla fighting intensified in Iraq against the nation’s foreign saviour/oppressors, The Humanity Carpet hosted a performance incorporating dance, poetry, song, projected images and music.

Commedia dell’Arte’s Brighella finds himself stranded on the Humanity Carpet in a war zone. He has lost his memory and expresses his dismay in the Venetian dialect. His traditional rival in love and social standing, Arlequino, moved by Brighella’s helplessness, forces Brighella’s memory to the fore by chanting Roma football team’s spurring hymn, “Forza Italia”, a hymn also adopted by Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, as his political campaign slogan. Arlequino, too, easily draws thoughtless, bewildered and eager-to-please spectators to join him in his chant. Brighella remembers everything:

Kidnapped from his master, Pantalone, by Berlusconi, and sold to the Bush & Blair Consortium, Brighella was sent to work in the coffee plantations. Even after he escapes from this slavery into a war zone, Brighella can only express his continued devotion and need for these manipulators of his fate. As Arlequino and Brighella’s journeys merge on the carpet, mimed escapes, colluding dances, projected translations, images of commercial well-being and human suffering are interspersed with South American protest songs and rhythms, laments of devalued love, poetry and the time defying sounds of the harpsichord. Mimicking his adored political masters, Brighella leads a pliable following from the humanity carpet to the bomb carpet: a roll of bubble wrap, every step an explosion. This following is now invited to engage with this (his)story, to mark their personal allegiance with big coloured marker pens on paper, experiencing the risk and responsibility that adopting power brings.

In the journey of the jute sacks through humanitarianly unfair trade routes to the LoVe factory, a developing world’s dependence is echoed in the Venetian dependence on the tourist trade, the very steps of which threaten its foundations. The rich mercantile multicultural Venice of the past has ceded to the America of the future. Bush stands as an unprepared phoney. Blair, from being the leader of a Protest Party, has found himself leading a Government, forgetting how to tell left from right on the way. And Berlusconi has replaced the Doge. Corruption, disorganisation, favouritism, adapting legal mores…Not an unfamiliar style of government in any times. Silvio manages to unsubtly carry it off in a Europe that at one time found it’s united identity in standing up against such internal vagaries.

The disappearing local life of Venice embodied in its spoken dialect and representing cultures eclipsed by an economic god, stands beside the emerging dominant culture of its Anglo Saxon rival. They tussle. Venice fights. The Anglo Saxons come down heavy handed. Caught up in the wash, even the Venetians find themselves colluding. The Humanity Carpet hosts the struggle of a world divided into Winners and Losers, titles that help to distract from what really happens in people’s lives.