Durational performance based on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of a working class intellectual. Sitting in a park for five eight hour days, I read six different books. The ones I wasn’t reading at the moment supported the chair I sat on. The reading selection was taken from an essay by Larry Busk and Billy Goehring “What Is a Working-Class Intellectual?”  At the end of the fifth day I destroyed the chair and gave away all of the books, admitting to myself that I had failed to become a working class intellectual.

Book selection:
Antonio Gramsci “Selections from the Prison Notebooks”
Hannah Arendt “The Life of the Mind”
Roland Barthes “Mythologies”
Herbert Marcuse “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”
Theodor Adorno “Prisms”
José Ortega y Gasset “The Revolt of the Masses”

Curated by Raffaella Venturi

Photos by Raffaella Venturi, Fausto Ferrara, and Valentino Sanna, video Giovanni Casu.