The Celebration of the Living (who reflect on death) 16th edition, 2–3 November 2025

collab < For fifteen years, in different places and forms, Lu Cafausu has been meeting on November 2 for the Celebration of the Living (who reflect on death).

This sixteenth edition has branched out into readings, performances, film screenings, music, drawing sessions, a numerical marathon and more, in homes, studios, public spaces and parks connected online for 30 consecutive hours (or perhaps more).

// From his studio in Rome, with the help of other people, Cesare Pietroiusti has counted from one to sixty-seven thousand starting at midnight between November 1 and 2 until the night of the 3rd. >

/ https://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=6271

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Counting, following the series of whole numbers, is, in theory, very simple. In practice, counting to the thousands or tens of thousands is inevitably fraught with errors: skipped numbers, stumbling blocks, returning to numbers passed long ago. The stumbling block, the uncertainty, precisely because they are momentary, and precisely because they occur in an action guided by an elementary rule, highlight a highly individualised expressive power. An expressiveness that can be seen as a form of (involuntary) resistance to the order of consecutio par excellence. The subject who makes a mistake at that moment cheats, that is, he shows up at the appointment with the “right” number in a guise that is not that of obedience to the rule, which we would expect from him, but with the characteristics of a character who, even if only for a few moments and before returning, literally, to order, tells another story, changes the cards on the table.

The expressiveness that manifests itself in those few moments almost always has a comic effect. The fact that the project Counting from One to Sixty-Seven Thousand had an explicit reference to the extermination of Gaza, and that therefore each number corresponded to a death, made the comic effect an embarrassing occurrence. The skipped number, the badly pronounced number, the non-existent number, became a death that was not given the respect it deserved, a death that did not count. A body that, after its indiscriminate and unjustified annihilation, falls for the second time into the category of indifference described by Judith Butler in The Alliance of Bodies: the denial, which in certain cases is implemented, of the very possibility of mourning.

I am aware of this delicate ethical issue, and several times during the count, I was ashamed of my spontaneous chuckle at the clumsiness of the mistake made by some of the people involved in the count. However, I believe that the possibility of including and understanding both the error and the embarrassment is the characteristic that distances Counting from One to Sixty-Seven Thousand from the emphatic celebratory or victimising dimension, bringing it closer to that of an artistic project. Precisely at the moment of maximum empathy, when unconditional solidarity with the victims is felt, the banal, tiny, ridiculous event emerges. This ambivalence places the project in the trajectory of an energetic tension that flows in a field defined by contradictory polarities, and not only in the certainty of a morally and politically correct “position”. In short, the error highlights the complexity of the declared intention of the project – which is necessary in order to give shape to the work and make it recognisable and expressible – to achieve the pre-established figure.

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