When Filippo Tommaso Marinetti officially presented the Tactilism manifesto to the public at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in Paris, it was January 14, 1921. Exactly one hundred years ago. In an Italy that could appear very different from the current one when in reality it is not so completely.
Then as today people are frightened, disoriented.
The Great War caused countless victims, exhausted the survivors, generated uncertainties and doubts and yet Marinetti invites his audience not to succumb, but slowly resume feeling and re-educate the body to the experience of novelty. He reminds his listeners of the need that led to having to wear masks, to hide, to protect themselves, to learn to avoid the enemy.
For Marinetti the time has come renew also Futurism, which wants to move away from his words in freedom, from crackling verses, from onomatopoeias... and instead bring him closer to the sense-meaning which all resides in touch, now, in perceiving through the skin that has been offended, denied, hidden. Here then it shows its futurist novelty: the tactile tables, or Tactilism, or Art of Touch. Because, says Marinetti, the skin is conductor of thought.
It will only be by wearing gloves for as long as possible that you will be able to stimulate and reawaken the natural desire to perceive through the pads of the fingers. Gain experience in the dark of his own room, training himself to distinguish objects, their shape and texture as he learned himself in the dark basement of a trench in Gorizia in 1917.
Marinetti's tactile tables teach getting to know the world through the skin, and getting to know ourselves and our reactions. They are not a work of art or an innovative discovery by him, as he himself admits, who claims to have been inspired by the ingenious forms of the Jongleuse and the Hors-Nature of Rachilde.
The artist's originality is most strongly manifested in the hand travel: abstract or evocative tables, ideal for those who cannot travel, which instead make it possible to wander with your hands along different paths and tracks.
Exactly one century after the birth of Tactilism, the FVE publishing house in Milan is offering a book that encompasses its content and profound meaning and offers it to the public in a period in which it can truly be help to allow spiritual communications between human beings through the epidermis.
Reference Bibliography
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Tactilism and the geometric and mechanical splendour, FVE, Milan, 2020. Text of the conference at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in Paris on 14 January 1921. Foreword by Valentina Ferri.
