The Chiotami Manifesto

(pron. kio'tahmee)

I was six when I first knew of the chiotami. Jesus made them for sure, quite a lot of them, yet I could not imagine their form or matter. I asked my mother. Pretending that she did not know anything, she wanted me to believe that in the sentence O mio caro e buon Gesù, fa chiotami sempre più (Oh my dear and good Jesus, make meloveyou more and more) the expression fa chiotami (make meloveyou) should read as fa che io t'ami (make me love you). I did not believe her, of course. To implore Jesus that he made me love him was nonsense to me. Why should he need to be loved by me, in the first place? Didn't he have his own mother? Anyway, I was not interested. On the other hand, it was obvious that a powerful man like Jesus should do great things: the chiotami, in fact. But nobody was willing to reveal  the secret to me. I was too little to know, I guess. Be that as it may, I resigned myself and forgot all about that.

I was reminded of the chiotami years later, when the divine Master Eckhart gave me a new cue. The father generates the son in all men of all times who really want to be born again, not in Jesus of Nazareth alone. This was the core of his teaching – which means that every man is potentially divine and can make chiotami like Jesus. This truth was unacceptable to the Church of Eckhart's time and he was condemned, just as the Church of Jesus' time had condemned Jesus. Churches of all times don't like the idea that everyone could make their own chiotami, if they only wanted to. My mother too, I am sure, had to hide these things to me for similar reasons. I had found a precious key, but many years had still to pass before I knew how to use it.

In December 2001 I had a lunch with a group of artists in Turin. The story of the chiotami came up casually as had happened many times before, but this time it was not received with the usual polite or amused attention. A fantastic object  is not just an imaginary object to an artist, as it mostly is to ordinary people. It is an object perceived by the fantasy, and then possibly actualized as an object of art. For the first time I was among people who got the gist of the chiotami and wanted to bring them to concrete and visible existence. How come that more than half a century had to pass between the original intuition and its actualization?  I believe it is because the intuition was unzeitgemäss– not in tune with the times – as an other great German master would have said. In the middle of last century only a child could be candid enough to intuit the chiotami and take their intuition seriously. But at the start of the new century a new space opens between the rationalists who don't believe in magic, and the irrationalists who spoil it as they try to get hold of it by means of dogmas and beliefs. In this space the human kind, starting with its creative vanguard,  the artists, will be able to claim its primeval capacity of making chiotami, for all too long believed to be an exclusive privilege of the gods.

The chiotami (singular or plural) is a mysterious and fantastic object, which also embodies a critical feature. In its production the artist moves on the line connecting the two poles of sacrality and debunking. In the former the artist recovers his or her original shamanic function as they become intermediary of the sacred; in the latter they apply an inflexibly and uncompromisingly critical attitude to all power symbols, with special reference to whatever claims to embody the sacred in some exclusive way, as though a hierophany were truer or superior to any other – a claim that only produces idols and fetishes. An individual chiotami can find itself nearer to the one or the other pole, depending on the choice of the artist and various concomitant factors, but it always stands on the line connecting them, the bearing axis of the most advanced artistic research today. I might not overstate my case if I say that the chiotami is the object that more and better than any other represents the artistic proceeding at the dawn of the third millennium. Tullio Carere Comes