We report in full the press release from Al.Di.Qua.Artists - Alternative Disability Quality Artists, the first Italian trade association of artists with disabilities, regarding some episodes that occurred at the just concluded Sanremo Festival.
*While recognizing the existence of multiple genders, we have chosen to use the overextended feminine in this text to facilitate reading and make it more accessible
The third evening of the Sanremo Festival took place on Thursday 13 February and the articulated, complex, large and stratified community of people with disabilities in Italy saw years of discussions and struggles on the right to self-determination, on the quality of the representation of one's lives, on oppressive language and on the ableist perspective, crumble live on Rai.
Speaking with this press release is Al.Di.Qua.Artists - Alternative Disability Quality Artists, an Italian trade association of artists with disabilities. We are people united by being workers in art and entertainment with physical, motor, sensorial, visible, invisible disabilities, located in the neurodivergence spectrum. From these multiple and multifaceted positions we live our lives as citizens and therefore also as Rai viewers.
What happened on Thursday was not a bolt from the blue but the eye of a cyclone, anticipated in the previous days by rains that went from light to persistent. The early evening brought a pleasant spring drizzle. The 2025 edition of the Festival opened with the dutiful and respectful tribute to the musician Ezio Bosso who passed away in 2020 and rightly remembered for his internationally recognized professionalism.
On the second day the rain became decidedly more disturbing. It was an atmospheric event with downpour and annoying wind dedicated to the memory of Sammy Basso, an activist with a disability who died in 2024. If we heard Ezio Bosso's music, we were only granted a photo of Sammy Basso from behind in the arms of Lorenzo Cherubini, aka Jovanotti, while he was not remembered for his skills and his work as a popularizer and activist, but as a person who loved life despite everything, he was always in the arms of Jovanotti, he weighed like an apple, people went crazy for him, he taught us many things. A generic, approximate, violent portrait for the cancellation of the person in favor of a hyper-attention to the peculiarities of the body.
After two evenings in which living and able-bodied people remembered dead and disabled professionals, we thought that the authors of the program would stop considering their disability moment in the festival, technically "inspirational porn", to be over, but no.
As living people in dialogue with equally living people, we would like to adopt the good practice of calling our interlocutors by name. With this press release we are addressing only and exclusively those who sign the seventy-fifth edition of the Sanremo Festival: we call into question the artistic director Carlo Conti and the authors Mario D'Amico, Emanuele Giovannini, Ludovico Gullifa, Lavinia Iannarilli, Giancarlo Leone, Ivana Sabatini, Walter Santillo and Leopoldo Siano. We ask you to take account of the thematic, lexical, directorial and timing choices made for the construction of the moment dedicated to the Roman company Teatro Patologico.
After two evenings in which for the disabled quota (a term we use with a declared provocative tone) deceased people were chosen, therefore told by other people, even on the third day Carlo Conti, despite inviting a company made up of people with disabilities, Teatro Patologico, decides to give the floor to the director, the only one legally able and therefore entitled to be presented by name, Dario D'Ambrosio, with the following words:
A very strong person, an extraordinary person (...) an actor and a director who has put his talent and his life at the service of those suffering from physical and mental disabilities.
If the authors of the Sanremo Festival were updated on the rich debate that is raging around the issues related to the representation of people with disabilities, they would not need us to understand the disastrous effect of this openness on collective imaginations. In the frenetic times of television, this introduction establishes the rigid framework that will enclose the entire intervention of Teatro Pathologico: skilled and talented people with extraordinary (therefore exceptional, undue, out of the ordinary) strength (connected to the idea of fatigue, weight, effort and sacrifice) put themselves at the service (precisely defining a hierarchy which is strengthened rather than discussed by these terms) of those who "suffer" from physical and mental disabilities. The formation of two subjects is therefore clear: on the one hand a person whose name and surname is given and who is described as rich in talent, professionalism, strength, an extraordinary personality, a spirit of self-sacrifice and generosity; on the other, a single macro subject, i.e. a group of human beings without name, surname, personal characteristics, specific talents, innate or acquired skills, but all sharing the suffering of disability. Because in this Sanremo 2025 for disability (a term used in such a vague and elusive way that it loses meaning) people suffer and die.
End!
You don't live, you don't work, you don't fall in love, you don't cultivate passions, you don't have sex, you don't swim, you don't walk in the mountains. We are born, we suffer, we die.
Family members are made to suffer!
After introducing the only person in the company worthy of name, surname and humanisation, it was decided to use the remaining time available not to introduce the people on stage, but to talk about the suffering of their families. Again: the subjects, the protagonists of the story are not the disabled people, but the able-bodied people around them.
The question of the terrible loneliness in which disabled people - WE, we are the first people who must be talked about - and our families are left by the State is a very serious question which concerns precisely the choices of that policy which the artistic director Carlo Conti has declared he does not want to deal with. If there is no interest in examining the thorny and constant cuts to the third sector, the regional economic and social class disparities, the healthcare and targeted placement deficiencies, the structural absence of independent living projects and funding for ad personam assistance... if you don't want to get your hands dirty with politics then we must be careful not to even dare to superficially touch on very important issues that determine the quality of life, and sometimes life itself, of disabled people in our problem Beautiful country.
Dear authors of the Sanremo Festival, Dear artistic director, poorly written rhetoric generates misunderstandings and if done superficially by the Ariston Theater in prime time, those misunderstandings can take root and become dangerous.
On Thursday evening, due to your lack of study on ableism, probably due to the absence of discussion with the reference community, which is there, is alive and knows very well how it wants to be represented, you dragged the collective discussion on the narrative of disabled people back 30 years. Now you will see your invoices paid and you will return to dealing with customs and society while We, who are unable to see our professionalism recognised, we who to date have not been renewed by the current Meloni Government the only tender which financed the circulation of artists with disabilities in Italy, we who are fighting for the professionalisation of artists with disabilities, who demand accessible higher education courses and more complex imaginaries, We remain here, without subsidies or media power, to deal with the rubble that you have generated with your disengaged and violent hurricane.
It is not enough to represent disability on the Ariston stage to even the score, we need to understand how to do it, we need to relaunch the representations, we need to question ourselves with the subjectivities of reference. It is necessary to call these subjectivities by name, because they are changing and multifaceted identities that overflow the boundaries of diagnoses. We don't want to put on a show, some of us do show business as a profession. Good hearts and good intentions do not cover the rights we lack. Pietism does not give us the strength that you say you receive from us.
We are not salt for your lives, we are not just seasoning, we are lives.
Al.Di.Qua.Artists
02/14/2025