Interview by Matteo Pini 
Portrait courtesy of Francesca Laura Cavallo

MP You co-curated the 2015 exhibition Risk at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. Did your book, Aesthetics of Risk, originate there? 

FLC It actually started long before that. When I was doing a Masters at the London Consortium, I saw a film by Rosa Barba called The Empirical Effect (2010). The film shows people living next to Mount Vesuvius, the volcano near Naples. Most of the film takes place in the former Vesuvius Observatory, which was founded in 1841 and was dedicated to monitoring past eruptions and tracking future ones, with these incredible old maps and machinery. For the film, she invited the survivors of the 1944 Vesuvius eruption to spend some time in the observatory. They don’t really know what to do there, and she films them fiddling with the predictive instruments designed to protect them. The film, for me, is about dealing with the future, knowing that the volcano will erupt again. This conflicted state of temporality, suspended between knowledge of past disasters and the possibility of future ones, became very interesting. 

MP You identify events of the mid-20th century – the Cold War, but also the Moon landing – as evidence for a boom time in the celebration of risk takers, particularly as it pertains to American identity. What impact did this period have on art? 

FLC Art is a field where risk is always encouraged: even today, art students are encouraged to explore the unknown. During the post-war period, artists moved away from the symbolic or representational order towards performativity and centring their own identities in their work, as well as towards staging risky situations. Still, besides these risky attitudes, I think the connection between art and its historical context has been underplayed: a lot of what artists created at the time was a direct response to events unfolding around them, for example, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, environmental disasters that made pollution impossible to ignore. Artists were exposed to the idea that we can destroy the world, because we nearly did. Much art stems from this history

MP In the body-based performances you discuss in the book, risk is self-directed in an unprecedented way. 

FLC We could say that British health and safety culture doesn’t allow for that kind of work to happen as much. Or, when it does happen, it happens within certain parameters that guarantee the participants’ safety. In the 1990s, there was a trend for this kind of post-human body-based work that was almost masochistic. Performance artists like Franko B and Ron Athey were important in this area. It comes automatically to think that their work is about risk, but I think risk is more about unpredictability. In their work, the artist controls themself and so creates a bond of empathy with the audience. Something like Valie Export’s Tap and Touch Cinema or Marina Abramović’s work is a lot more unpredictable than that of many male artists: with Abramović and Export, there’s risk for the artist and for the audience. It’s a spectrum. 

MP One of the book’s chapters traces the history of tarot as an art form uniquely intertwined with risk. What can divination teach us about how risk was historically constructed? 

FLC Tarot was used less to predict the future, and more as a tool for meditation and reflection on the choices you’ve made. In ancient Greece, before you went to war, you would visit the Oracle of Delphi to ask it whether they thought you’d win or not. The Oracle would talk in riddles and write its messages on leaves, never giving a clear-cut answer, but still informing what a person did. The Oracle had incredible knowledge and expertise: all sorts of people would visit it, and for that reason, it was very clued up about everything that was going on. Whether the future the Oracle predicted was real or not, it became real in the moment in which it was taken as a model for decision-making. I love the story of the Nilometer in ancient Egypt, a well with a vertical column that would monitor water levels. If the device was full, the priest would warn people of the flood, suggesting that it was the gods speaking, but in reality, it was a prediction based on evidence. Risk assessment is not modern. 

MP You write that risk is often assessed from a place of safety, and this negotiation holds implications for those who carry the weight of risk. 

FLC In the UK, there’s a crazy health and safety culture. I come from the south of Italy where we improvise everything, but when I travel there are places where sometimes I am afraid of crossing the road. Each society has different perceptions and constructions of risk, and that’s what makes communicating the idea of safety so difficult. We saw that during Covid-19. 

MP Covid-19 was a productive time for interrogating how risk is communicated in society. 

FLC Bruno Latour wrote an article in Le Figaro arguing that the pandemic was a kind of rehearsal, a social experiment in which people were forced to deal with unprecedented situations differently. I came across a pamphlet produced in collaboration with Indigenous leaders in the Amazon region about Covid-19 protocols, washing your hands and such. The visuals are amazing, because rather than the conventional sign of hand-washing, the image pictures large hands arching inwards above an elderly person, almost forming a protective or enclosing gesture around them. The message is about care for the elderly, rather than Boris Johnson saying, “Prepare to lose your loved ones.” Covid-19 was also a performance of graphs and death rates, the kind of mathematical, probabilistic idea of risk practised in healthcare. How we construct methods for controlling or preparing for an unknown future is always some form of rehearsal. If you see a fire exit sign, you know where you need to go. Even if nothing happens, the sign reminds you that something might happen. An imaginary future is always performed in the present through these different methodologies – symbols, warnings, instructions, data visualisations – all of which remind us that risk exists. Health and safety protocols started as a kind of grassroots movement, a battle to defend workers from the increased dangers of the Industrial Revolution. We have gone in completely the other direction. These measures are not in the interest of individuals, but company owners. It’s not so much the protocols that are the problem, but the structures of institutional power behind them. .