Beuys and the «difesa della natura» in 2023

27.10.2023 — Presentation of the wine “F. I. U. Difesa della Natura” at the Vinseum in Vilafranca del Penedès. Photo: Marco Noris

«La vendimia -explica Josep Marrugat- ha estado marcada por una sequía muy fuerte, y en casos como el Baix Penedès podemos hablar de prácticamente una ‘zona cero’ donde buena parte de la viña en municipios como Llorenç del Penedès, Banyeres del Penedès, L’Arboç, Bellvei, Albinyana o Sant Jaume dels Domenys ha quedado muy tocada, con pérdidas de producción de entre el 60% y el 70% y vides muertas».

— El Baix Penedès, ‘zona cero’ de la sequía en la viña

Watching dry vineyards slide past the train window on the outskirts of Vilafranca del Penedès, I think of the presentation of the wine “F. I. U. Difesa della Natura”¹ by Joseph Beuys that I attended a few days ago at the Vinseum in Vilafranca. A thorough event when it came to the making of Beuys’s work and its relationship with Abruzzo, but one in which the contemporary environmental question was entirely missing — the «difesa della natura come difesa dell’essere umano» (to quote Lucrezia de Domizio Durini) beyond the abstract theories of art.

In this dramatic environmental situation we find ourselves in², we ought to stop acting as if nothing were happening. «Everyone is an artist», but on the edge of the abyss we should all be environmentalists too: we cannot keep delegating to others the defence of our own existence. That’s why I believe that a wine museum, in a land battered by drought, at an event about Beuys, should have taken a step forward in this direction.

For art to really be a tool for change, we urgently need the complicity of all the agents of the art world: do we want the German artist’s name to end up on the list of the great defeated of the 20th century, or do we want to keep it alive and take up his message for the defence of the future of the human being?

Joseph Beuys, Difesa della Natura, 1984. Photo: Joseph Beuys Difesa Della Natura, 1984 (signed) – bentpriorities