Signal: 09: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture

THEY HAVE CALLUSES ON THEIR TONGUES. WE HAVE CALLUSES ON OUR HANDS.

A DISCUSSION WITH PIETRO PEROTTI

WORKER ARTIST AGITATOR PUPPET MAKER

Protest outside of Fiat factory, Turin, 1983.

Pietro Perotti was a worker at the Turin, Italy, Fiat factory from 1969 to 1985. As a self-appointed representative of Fiat workers’ communication, he created posters, leaflets, stickers, and a magazine. He drastically changed the approach to workers’ demonstrations and pickets by introducing protest puppets and street theater. This interview focuses on his artistic strategies in support of the workers’ struggle, the life lessons he learned after many years of being involved in the struggle, and the relation between the individual and the group.

Pietro Perotti: What will you do with this interview? I didn’t understand what you need it for.

Davide Tidoni: I am interested in the link between art and politics in your creative work, like the contribution you brought to the workers’ movement and how you contributed to the birth of new forms of protest and struggle. I am also interested in how you understand your own artistic practice within the wider social discourse that goes beyond simple self-expression. On a personal level, I want to know how you have balanced artistic self-expression and political commitment, how you inhabit your role as an artist, both inside and outside political struggles.

I’m interested in talking with you because you are someone who has done a lot but hasn’t spoken that much, which is different to what seems to happen in many art contexts, where there is a tendency to privilege philosophical discourse. There is a certain fascination with theory, presented by people who often do not have much direct experience.

Well, they have calluses on their tongues. We have calluses on our hands.

Maybe let’s start by saying a little about where your creative artistic spirit comes from.

I come from a town in the province of Novara called Ghemme. I was born in February 1939, then World War II broke out that September. No one in my family was artistically inclined. I only ever found a poem by my grandfather who had written something ironic about the blackouts that happened during wartime. When I went to school, the teacher said, Make a drawing. All the others drew a lawn, a house, flowers. I drew a red devil. The teacher went to the headmaster to show him that I had done different things from the usual. She was nice, but the headmaster was a fascist military officer and he didn’t like my drawing. He called my parents and I was scolded, so I stopped drawing. I have not drawn since then.

My first encounter with art was in the carnivals of ’55 and ’56 in my village. Farmers, builders, workers made carts without having any artistic notion. We parish boys made a cart with flasks, wire, hessian fabric [burlap], and plaster. We didn’t even know how to use papiermâché. The important thing at the time was that the war was over. There was a great enthusiasm, a desire to get on with life and to participate.

Comrades—Let’s Free Ourselves!, silk-screened poster, 1970s.

Later, as a teenager in the parish, there were nativity scenes to be made, and I started making sculptures with clay. I also imitated Chaplin, did some skits, and made the scenery with cardboard.

Then one day I saw Dario Fo on the TV show Canzonissima. He did a skit about a builder who died, which had been censored by the broadcasters.¹

Almost the same thing happened to me in ’67–68. I worked in a factory in town, and I had thought of doing a skit making fun of the owner of the factory. I made the workers as if they were the pipes of an organ, and the owner directed them by whipping them. Then there was a choir that I called il Coro del Polveron (the Dusty Choir), because we worked in a textile factory. We worked with cotton and there was dust everywhere. The choir sang, When the siren sounds / Be it winter or summer / Whether it rains or the wind blows / Let’s go to work. Then the refrain: In the middle of the dust / In the bales of cotton / In the middle of the dust / We are soaked in sweat. Then: When the sun beats down / There is air conditioning / Coca-Cola and orange soda / Galli Gazzosa / Aniseed water. At the end of the song, we got panettone: When it’s very cold outside / We get hot from working / And on Christmas Eve / He gives us panettone.² One evening we were rehearsing, and the parish priest came and said, Stop, you cannot do this. You must not make fun of the owner who gives you work. The owner was named Crespi. He was a bit like [Gianni] Agnelli.³ He ran everything, he had three factories, the sports club, and the parish. So we were censored, and since then, little by little, I began to understand how things worked.

At a patronal feast in 1968, I presented Judas ’68. It featured a skeleton with a lot of money in its hands, wearing half of a priest’s hat and half of a tall top hat, and a red handkerchief around its neck. This was because the Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia.

Fiat workers’ protest, 1979. Photos by Raffaele Santomauro.

The previous year I had presented works with found materials. A piece of wood from the mountains had become an atomized dog hit by the atomic bomb. Next I made a crucifix that became the Christ of the Hopeless, made with copper coils and hessian fabric. Like something by Calder. This Christ ended up here in Turin, where there was a dissenting Catholic priest who used to celebrate Mass in a garage. I gave him the crucifix.

Our political group in town was formed when we found out about Lettera a una professoressa (Letter to a schoolmistress) and L’obbedienza non è più una virtù (Obedience is no longer a virtue) by don [Lorenzo] Milani.⁴ Those were our first political books.

But where did these artistic ideas come from? Was it all stuff you came up with by yourself?

Of course. I only completed primary school, and I tried to become more cultured a little at a time. When I arrived in Turin, I realized that the banners and flags were obsolete, and it was no good to see people who walked behind the demonstration without contributing anything personal. I believe in organization, but I also believe in the individual, in what each one brings in terms of creativity and innovation.

In Turin you noticed that the workers were following the demonstration with flags and banners but they had no other ideas—they did not know how to give these old forms new meaning.

There was no individual action. There was involvement, but no individual intervention. I started doing street theater because during the struggles over work contracts I saw mechanical workers employed at Mirafiori making coffins. Coffins for the dead, with Fiat and Zaccagnini written on them.⁵ I thought this was grim, so I started making colorful things with cardboard, trying to make fun, using irony. I believe that irony is a very strong thing. It’s not by chance that in Paris a few years ago they killed [Georges] Wolinski and the Charlie Hebdo guys. When I came to Turin in ’69, I found the first ten copies of L’Enragé, a magazine of political satire founded during the student revolts of May ’68. Wolinski was the first of my teachers. Siné and Wolinski are two cartoonists who have strongly inspired me.

Protest puppet heads of metalworkers union leaders Luciano Lama, Pierre Carniti, and Giorgio Benvenuto, 1982.

Gianni Agnelli (head of Fiat) puppet, at a metalworkers’ demonstration over work contracts, Turin, 1979. Photo by Raffaele Santomauro.

At Fiat I made a twentyfive-foot-tall Agnelli puppet that people carried around. Agnelli said, We will not drop our trousers, but during marches workers would pull its trousers down, leaving the puppet in flowery underwear, and everyone would laugh. Neither the news nor the press have ever shown these things. It means that they hit the mark and the workers were amused. I tried to bring a little smile into that factory, a little joy. Now everything is clean, but back then it was a disaster, it was a wretched place.

You made street theater.

Yes, it became street theater. People moved, and it became movement. It was a dynamic thing. I have always been in favor of dynamic things that were not static but that moved with the people. People participated in these things. It’s not like you were alone in the back. Things moved around, especially when we went to Rome on March 23, 1984, against the Craxi government.⁶ It was the biggest demonstration in the postwar period, something never seen before. The CGIL [the Italian General Confederation of Labor, a national trade union] gave us a truck, and we went down with the structure that we built. There was a huge dragon that had Fanfani, Spadolini, Andreotti, and Agnelli on it.⁷ Apart from that, the Craxi puppet was walking around with a sign saying, I don’t care about the streets while all the people were laughing and cheering.

It seems to me that you had a need to express yourself creatively. You lived the reality of a worker and therefore you applied your creativity in the context of the workers’ struggle, but if you hadn’t had the creative drive, would you have approached the political struggle anyway or not?

I think so. Look, the idea of coming to Fiat was a political choice. I came to Turin because I thought that the revolution would start from there. I joined Fiat in ’69, and whilst I was there, I joined Lotta Continua.⁸ I thought their goal was to make a contribution, to develop workers’ class consciousness. I had read [Antonio] Gramsci and his writings from the newspaper L’Ordine nuovo for a while. You know Gramsci’s phrase: Educate yourselves because we will need all your intelligence. Be excited because we will need all your enthusiasm. I thought the same, but while attending the meetings I realized that Lotta Continua was too spontaneous. They came, they heard the workers, and they told them, Tomorrow, you have to strike. Some went on strike, but they weren’t in a union and they weren’t protected, and then Fiat fired them. So it was all a bit exploitative. I wanted to join an organization that would give me tools, so I joined Avanguardia Operaia⁹ because they had made some publications and they also organized political