Dialogue on anger
collettivoSERRA on Chinese Never Die: Yan 宴 by BEIMA
«The container swayed as the crane moved it onto the ship. As if it were floating in the air, the spreader, the mechanism that hooks the container to the crane, could not tame its movement. The poorly fastened doors burst open, and dozens of bodies began to rain down. They looked like mannequins. But when they hit the ground, their heads shattered like real skulls. And they were skulls. Men and women came out of the container. Some young people too. Dead. Frozen, all gathered, one on top of the other. In line, packed like sardines in a tin. They were the Chinese who never die. The eternal ones who pass their documents from one to another. That is where they had ended up. The bodies that the wildest imaginations pictured cooked in restaurants, buried in the gardens around the factories, or thrown into the mouth of Vesuvius. There they were. Falling by the dozens from the container, with their names pinned to a tag tied around their necks. They had all saved money to be buried in their hometowns in China. A portion of their wages was withheld in exchange for the promise of a return journey once they were dead. A space in a container and a hole in some piece of Chinese soil. When the crane operator at the port told me about it, he covered his face with his hands and kept looking at me through the space between his fingers. As if that mask of hands gave him more courage to speak. He had seen bodies fall and had not even needed to sound the alarm or alert anyone. He had simply lowered the container to the ground, and dozens of people who had appeared from nowhere had put everything back inside and cleaned the remains with a hose.»
Saviano Roberto, Gomorra. Viaggio nell'impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della camorra, Edizioni Mondadori, 2006 (english translation by collettivoSERRA)
Although the spectral presents itself here with the density of tangible things, its substance remains purely perceptual. The nature of this apparition is not given to be known; what is certain is only its intangible presence. It creeps in like a cold current of air through the joints of space, glides along polished surfaces, and lingers in the corners where light hesitates too long. It has no form, yet it imposes a disposition. It is what dictates the silent rhythm of the room, arranging things according to a foreign, unspoken order.
At the center, the table stands still, like a sign left unfinished. Around it, the empty stools do not invite but delimit, like minimal bodies set to contain an absence. The suspended container looms with the mute weight of things deprived of their use; nothing in this geometry is accidental, yet nothing openly reveals its function. One has the impression of standing before an interrupted scene,
a feast of which only the material coordinates remain.
The anger that runs through the work is ordinary, sedimented. It is the anger that comes from being looked at without being seen, recorded but not recognized. Chinese Never Die is an expression that has circulated in Italy for decades, a commonplace that turns people into eternal presences, stripped of history, fragility, and death. It is the dull sound of a verbal fragment that belongs to no one. The work is a way of naming the invisible. A suspended condition, as if it floated on the surface of common language, insinuating itself into the interstices of thought, emptying bodies of history, of mourning, of possible returns. It is a formula that freezes. Yet here, under the skylight of the station, the dead return without announcements, without demands. They return like draughts, like changes in temperature, like intervals of time that no one notices but everyone passes through.
The temporal structure of the work follows the rhythm of mourning in Chinese tradition: seven days, then another seven, until forty-nine. The seven weeks of the soul’s journey, the tóu qī, compose a liminal time in which the living and the dead coexist in the wait for separation. Each day, an offering, a light, a gesture. Repetition builds meaning and restores rhythm to pain. The number seven, in its phonetic resonance between “together” (qí) and “beginning” (qǐ), introduces a sense of continuity: what ends is gathered, what disappears begins elsewhere. In this way, like mourning itself, the work unfolds through the language of the threshold. Numerology acts as an invisible grid, guiding the duration of presences, marking rhythms that do not belong to the civil calendar. Each cycle opens a passage, a slow transition between contiguous worlds, a movement that does not need visibility to affirm itself.
This hidden rhythm also runs through the installation, which slowly transforms over the weeks, like a body breathing in a time different from that of the trains passing beyond the glass.
The character 宴 remains at the margin, suspended in its opacity. It unites within itself the signs of roof, mother, and light: an interior that shelters, a community under the same space. Yet for those who do not know the language, it remains opaque, indecipherable.
It is a linguistic fracture that forces one to dwell in incomprehension. In this suspension, identity vibrates like a disturbed signal, a distant voice that cannot be tuned. The spectral then unravels language and leaves it unfinished. It summons without calling, holds without declaring itself. The work does not represent death, nor does it narrate it; it restores its diasporic condition, its perpetual exile, its way of seeping into the folds of matter and time.
Whoever crosses the space becomes a body in transit, traversed by a silent, foreign order. Some perceive a slowing down, a subtle crack, a moment when the air grows denser. Others remain immersed in the flow, without distinction. The spectral exercises a stubborn patience; it settles in perceptual interstices, adheres to distracted gestures, and anchors itself to what escapes attention.
宴 fully belongs to IRA GENERANS. Anger as a force that does not destroy but holds together, that brings forth, that demands attention.