DORMIVEGLIA PROTEIN.
It sounds like a supplement for artists who create in the space between sleep and wakefulness.
Its actually supplement for artists who are not fully awake, not entirely asleep, but somehow still productive.
Davide said: Porta Venezia, 19 / 7, D’Angelo Bar. For poor artists.
Then I wrote to him that I was late because I’d been watching the birds above Milan.
He ordered a birra. I ordered water to a Chinese waiter who understood nothing, or perhaps understood everything differently.
Then we received what we had not ordered.
Prosciutto, gluten and plums.
Then another waiter arrived, he spoke Italian, and he brought what we had actually ordered.
Birra alla fragola for Davide and John Cage’s water to me.
Plums were still on the table. They made me think of Serbia.
Then I told Davide that my genius friend Nina Lalić had invented a new term:
SUPERBIAN.
A brand, she said: It’s superb to be a Serb.
The superb was already hiding inside the Serb, waiting for someone to add two letters, to push two letters UP and let it breathe.
sUPerbians.
I told Davide how Nina and I decided the brand needed a colour.
Not one selected from a catalogue.
One with ancestry.
A colour made by mixing the colours of the Serbian flag:
red, blue, white.
Davide Googled the flag.
There it was:
one white double-headed eagle.
Two heads.
One body.
So boring.
Then I showed him the other flag.
The SUPERBIAN flag.
Not red. Not blue. Not white. Plum. Mauve tone.
The colour of the Serbian plum, šljiva, an indigenous fruit, and of šljivovica, which is what happens when a plum refuses to remain a plum.
Davide liked the colour. He liked the flag. He liked the sound of SUPERBIANS.
I wrote on Whatsapp to Nina: Davide loves the idea. He would wear a SUPERBIAN T-shirt.
Nina replied: Posrbljuj šta stigneš
A sentence that needs no flag.
SUPERBIANISE EVERYTHING YOU CAN.
The plum had crossed the border.
It was no longer a fruit. It was a colour, a nation, a proposition. A small purple refusal to remain what it had been called before.
Davide, who had ordered a strawberry beer, was now prepared to wear a plum cotton t-shirt.
After the plums we moved on to frogs and gigner lemon tea.
He showed me a species of frog he keeps at home and told me he is obsessed with frogs and insects. He would love to build an enormous glass hangar, something like Philip Johnson’s Glass House, where he could keep and take care of all these creatures. Like huge terarium. I would add aquarium. I love water and underwater creatures.
And I think it’s a brilliant idea for his next artistic installation: long-durational, life-durational.
An artwork that doesn’t simply last for a long time, but continues for as long as life itself does.
Then I asked GPT to create a visual representation of what it might look like. And this is what I got: AI-generated content for the future. And then I remembered a t-shirt that said:
The only thing I liked GPT gave me was only that greenish tint.
That touch of green.
I called Davide GFP – Green Fluorescent Protein – because I am vegan and need green protein in my life. He called me Broccola because he needs me for his skincare routine.
We sat outside. The temperature of our conversation remained unchanged, even as the temperature outside began to drop.
We talked about life before and after. About memory and the body. About how the body we see is not the only body there is.
There are other bodies. Layers of being.
1. Annamaya Kosha / the sheath composed of food.
2. Pranamaya Kosha / the sheath composed of life force.
3. Manomaya Kosha / the sheath composed of mind.
4. Vijnanamaya Kosha / the sheath composed of wisdom.
5. Anandamaya Kosha / the sheath composed of bliss.
Five bodies, or five coverings of the Self. From food to breath, from mind to wisdom, from wisdom to bliss.
And somewhere beneath these layers, or perhaps inside the last one, the question of what we mean when we say I am this body.
Davide, GFP / Green Fluorescent Protein.
Julija, Broccola.
Two poor artists at Porta Venezia, feeding each other proteins, theories of the body, and whatever else the evening had to offer.
Besides being beautiful because of his skincare routine, Davide has something incredibly tender about him, despite claiming that he likes violence and ping-pong.
Next week, he’s going to Friuli for ten days to play ping-pong. Ping-pong is like yin and yang. Like his parents. His father is the Italian ping-pong champion, and his mother is a champion, too, but in a different discipline.
Then my hands grew colder and colder, so we made a practice called Oceans Fingers, an attempt to warm up my hands and fingertips.
My hands are cold, I said.
Davide said: I am always hot.
We laughed, it was true.
Then Davide told me that women cannot make sushi because their hands are naturally warmer. According to the laws and certifications of sushi tradition, he said, there are no women sushi chefs in the world, precisely because of the temperature of their hands. It was breaking news for me.
We drank what we hadn’t ordered.
And after three hours of philosophising about life and art, Davide started to look like a professor when he put on my prescription glasses. The eyesight was useless.
The authority, impeccable. He looked like a professor of quantum acoustics at the Sorbonne or Oxford.
A week ago, he had become a professor.
Film history. NABA, the academy.
I looked at him.
A professor now.
Then I thought of my glasses.
Silhouette.
He tried on my glasses.
I lost my objectivity.
He looked seductive.
He should have a pair of Silhouette.
The only problem: the frames might cost half a professor’s salary. And he has been a professor for only a week. Just begun his career as a professor, without glasses.
Poor artist born with expensive taste both with moon in Rohini.
It was already 10 pm. The cold was setting in. We were getting sleepy.
So we did Ocean Fingers one more time.
Then Davide told me that, as a child, he had been a performer. He invented costumes and filmed himself, like Matthew Barney.
We made an agreement.
In the future, we would use our childhood traumas to make art instead of AI.
It will be so poetic.
I sense it.
Davide is GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) I am Broccola, and together we produce DORMIVEGLIA PROTEIN.