H. said he loved us

Tommaso Tanini is an italian artist based in Rome. Together with Mfg Paltrinieri and Mirko Smerdel he founded the collective Discipula, a research platform operating in visual culture and art, exploring the interaction between image and text, fact and fiction.

The author built this project having as a starting point the controversial 1938 "L'uomo è forte" (Man is strong) by Corrado Alvaro, a novel in which there are no guidelines of time and space but follows the story of a man who, back home to offer his service to the new regime, sees the spreading of the climate of terror and the inability to save something of himself from all sorts of abolition and oppression.

This glimpse to the past cushions Tommaso's story, a careful look at the history of the GDR and the German Ministry for State Security (Stasi), digging into the archival and documentary research, trespassing beyond his personal quest, grabbing his very own roots, his own blood: his mother is Hungarian, a language that Tommaso speaks and understands to perfection, that allowed him to understand closely people remote stories, yet so indirectly connected.

Images are devoid of references and contours, timeless but subtlety revealing of their inherent psychology: rigid and set portraits, the urban landscapes of the former East Germany combined to small anonymous scraps of reality, the static and characterless interiors are main occurring details that run in these pages, alternating a sinister calmness to a passive-aggressive tension that is scattered throughout the project, full of strength, that creates a strange and unresolved game in which there is a part that spies, and a part that is spied on, a sort of silent contemplation of a nation crushing its cries under intent looks and concrete.

Every feeling tied to individuality is removed in favour of a shared common vision, built for all and that all must strictly embrace: never as in that historical moment, life takes on a claustrophobic dimension, made even more suffocating from the fictitious act of kindness which controls every situation, every gesture, every person, up to make life a blade upon which hold your breath.

"The trees were stationary, innocent creatures, icing without guile in a happy world of their own; their leaves moved as if they want to talk, all of that came out of them was a benevolent rustle. But the man-made world was shadowy and dark."

"Life is so marvellous. I have a mind and a heart; I am a man, I can work, I can make myself useful, I can live to some purpose. Here I am in the darkness and I must rise into the light, I am alone as if I were in prison, I am like a withered tree. I am alone, terribly alone." - Corrado Alvaro

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