Two macabre, and not friendly, shapes are heading towards us. These haughty, opinionated, pharaonic and dominators of an unhappy carnival are not able to look upon neither the sky nor look down on earth. As bright ghosts, taking on mockery and spite, these two masks moves forward safely, so into us and pierce our body and our mind; they don’t leave other sign than their faces rosaceous pallor and they would pretend our curtsy. At first they cause repulsion, then fear and, at the end, a restless departure. And we, shy and astonished, are wondering who could they be, so impudent and unthinking thespian; they have passed trough us with their mockingly wickedness, and they are disappear, leaving us breathless and in need to consider about the evident paradox of moving without moving. This static movement belong to the inane and mistreated human being who (as Dante Alighieri said in Inferno XXX) declares that eat, drink, sleep and dress ourselves (right and necessary things, of course, for everybody) are the ultimate purpose of life.

James Ensor was the painter of those grotesque shapes; he was a genial Belgian painter who would like to offer an imagine (of course very effective, but not linear) of false and mendacious people, able to hide their real face behind a mask; they are those kind of men that were living around Ensor, who haunt and despise him; the informal crowd of bourgeois society of his age, a this kind of society that the painter was hating because of its hypocrisy and its ability to betray.

At that time, Europe was living a euphoria age, a favourable time for business and entertainments (and the First World War made burst that soap bubble full of illusory optimism) and Ensor would like to leave to the next generations the grotesque and inhuman face of that people who, absorbed by pleasure of show itself, pretend to own what they did not own; people unscrupulous, without taste and culture, always ready to mock about what it could not dominate, manipulate and destroy.

And as we know as well, that age is, unfortunately, too similar to our age, but we have to face off that age, if we would like to choose healthy and necessarily: “I want to stop to be a clown”.

Tonalestate would like to invite us to think about this kind of clown that is not a “poet in action” who, in the circle as in the theatre, renew to the audience the possibility of be amazed and give and release it from the insane obsession of excelling. Tonalestate clown is that kind of being vainglorious and opinionated; with his empty and inopportune laugh, or with his ironclad, dark and uncultivated stubbornness, this clown breaks the beauty of the bright green summer, gets in the insecure way, regrets the human limit and it sluggishly shout the ones who are going to arrive with the appointment with the death, after living with great humility and absolute loyalty.

States and international organizations, their presidents, their institutions and, of course, everybody who, while they have a responsibility in the governments, decide, without even blushing, to deprive millions of people of their freedom of moving or their minimum needed to live, and who systematically choose to hinder all the attempts of real human coexistence, giving to everybody the circensem as only way of salvation; they maybe seem those terrible shapes that Ensor painted for us, isn’t it?

If we sincerely think, we could not acknowledge that men, starting from the powerful ones arriving to the miserable ones, rarely talk and cohabit seriously between them; this kind of seriousness says no to the hoax and to the heavy load imposed by stronger to weaker. Is not arrived the moment of thinking deeper about this? And are they going to do this, all these men dedicated to politics, intellectuals, all these men who consider themselves as experts of finance, geopolitics, armies, history and knowledge, and they pretend the right over the human being and his mystery?

We are speaking about this kind of seriousness, indeed, that has nothing to do with long faces, cynical, sceptical (they are the individual correspondence of the walls erected at the borders), but that kind of seriousness who needs a special courage of helping my personal and the other one way, straight on an eternal good, because, as Manzoni said, “fuor della vita è il termine” (“Beyond this life the confines”).

And “Fuor della vita è il termine” is the title of Antonio De Petro’s novel from where we pick up the sentence for this year Tonalestate Manifesto; this sentence explain the hidden, melting, almost inconsolable cry of people who knows how the world is a friendship enemy. And this sentence asks a question to each one of us: shall we be less distracted and shall we dedicate our lives to build what will make this world a more generous and more habitable place? And if it will cost sacrifice, are we conscious that this sacrifice deserves to be made?

The puppet of straw is always suggestible, while the man who knows the beneficial sacrifice of sharing wish to build árbores quae altero saeculo prosint (Stazio) – trees that will be useful in another century. This people generate new politics and new culture, because they are just living an experience of human coexistence where the end doesn’t justify the means, where every whim doesn’t become law and where what we declare is not in order to keep our own place. This Tonalestate is dedicated to these builders of friendship who are able to live with cleverness in a dark world, because the power, very strong and implacable, of these two Ensor’ s macabre ghosts hidden inside and outside of us, doesn’t win inside and outside of us.