ENJOY CCCP
CCCP
WORDS BY ACHILLE FILIPPONI
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ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE: ISA GENZKEN
FROM THE PREVIOUS ISSUE
MANIFESTO
From June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound.
FROM THE SHOP
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft.
MARK FLOOD
1017 ALYX 9SM
In January 2023, KALEIDOSCOPE presented a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Mark Flood (b. 1957), curated by Alessio Ascari, at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan. In his paintings, Flood deploys the detritus of contemporary culture—slogans, celebrities, logos, and memes—to mock American society and the elitist art world. The exhibition also provided the scenography for the runway presentation of the 1017 ALYX 9SM Fall/Winter 2023 collection.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Formed in Berlin by two Italians, CCCP was named for the Cyrillic spelling of the USSR, but pronounced in Italian: Chi-chi-chi-pee. Reaching beyond the simplicity of punk, but enamored with its nihilistic truth, politics and possibilities, they created a sound equal parts Soviet and Coca-Cola, avant-garde and folk.
In the midst of post-1977 gastroesophageal-reflflux Italy extrudes CCCP Fedeli alla linea. CCCP is not a punk band: it is a thing, a metamorphic block of marble reflecting the surrounding light of a country, filtering its memory and digging into itself, reminding you that you are always your own worst enemy. This is why thinking of CCCP as something merely musical is too much of a reduction, unless we strive to think of music as a formless, uncircumscribed, performative territory. The foundational encounter between Giovanni Lindo Ferretti and Massimo Zamboni in 1981, in West Berlin, marks the beginning of the life of a self-fermenting body oscillating between a too late and a not yet. Ferretti’s piercing, animalistic eyes show that this oscillation is political, Italian, but also personal, pharmacological, and generational. Zamboni wants to become a psychiatrist, but, at variance with the hospital regulations, he will not succeed. Ferretti works for five years in the asylum in Reggio Emilia, and this will change everything in his poetics, in the performativity of his body on stage, in his perception of the human being in general.
Berlin is decisive not only as the meeting place between the two founders but also because contacts with the industrial sphere and Islamic communities in the still-divided city would help create the psycho-political mixture of CCCP, in all aspects a highly significant Italian artistic experiment of the latter 20th century and beyond. What emerges is not a band in the narrowest sense of the term, but a jumbled lineup without even a drummer (a position later filled by drum machine) and which will shortly welcome Annarella Giudici and Danilo Fatur. Allowing such personalities to become part of the visual-musical mechanism of CCCP is to welcome a paroxysm. In her clothes and movements, Annarella is a soubrette. At the same time, she is both replicating and undermining a model of the female body intended to accompany something that is happening on stage. Doll, saint, mother, lady, dancer, nothing fully fifits—who is she? And then Fatur—the potentiality of CCCP is also due to her presence— an additional body on the stage that, compared to the music itself, is tangential, perfectly embodying all the ambiguities of being punk, of being everything except a future, of being unreasonable and immoderate in its brutal infantilism; it is the madness of a child who speaks only the truth.
But, if you look closely, it is CCCP’s entire journey that is a continuous literary musical present with each verse painting a picture of how things have gone (bad) and how they will go (worse). The performing core oscillates between the aesthetics of pro-Soviet militancy and Coca Cola, between the darkness of Brecht and television. CCCP is a body on a stretcher, always in motion; it is a perennial poetic transition from the soft blanket of a utopia to the nightmarish explosion of individualism with no return. Western capitalism is not the only enemy; also and above all, it is something within us, which is equal to our deepest cravings—it is that irrational functionalism that, being us and being in us, has already defeated us. The style of this swinging trend, between impossible dreaming and regret, reaches its climax in Affiinità-Divergenze fra il Compagno Togliatti e Noi – Del Conseguimento della Maggiore Età, a 1986 album in which are perhaps the most emblematic verses about the emotional zone in which post-ideological Italy finds itself: “I remember well-rounded and reasonable speeches / well-rounded and reasonable, I remember speeches / pierced I am /pierced by the future / I seek a person, I seek a person.” Can what was an epoch-making idea be reduced tothe merely personal? What is certain is that, to really describe a contingency, one must have come out of it; in fact, we are no longer in the midst of a revolt but, in Zamboni’s words, “we support revolt,” and it is not quite the same. Everything testifies to the fact that we are dealing with pro-Soviet punk posing the problem of being pro-Soviet in 1980s Italy, shattering almost all ties with a certain counter-power superficiality.
In the almost decade-long digression, in fact, beyond textual and performative angles, the CCCP experience is also mestizo in a strictly musical sense. As in a scenario in which sound must distill an extract of different pressures, CCCP moves fluidly between avant-garde and tradition, between folk music and new wave, hardcore punk and partisan songs. Everything is unstable and fascinating, composite but dry. The tones are always somber, the poetry mournful and already on the verge of blurring into the religious, as indeed will happen in Ferretti’s later experiences.
CCCP’s poetic arsenal is always expressed through the empty gaze of a convalescent soldier, because, as Ferretti himself confided in a 1988 interview, “it is difficult for people who are in severe pain to realize what they need.” Are we lost, or have we lost? Perhaps it’s the same thing. The literary contribution of the group is note worthy and will generate tired epigones. While their lyrical tones will remain unmatched in Italy and beyond, the stage is terminal, and the whole thing must come to an end before a world dawn. As it should have, the CCCP experience ended on October 3, 1990, the day of German reunification.
CCCP Fedeli Alla Linea was one of the most inflfluential Italian bands from the 1980s. In recent years, they have partnered with Slam Jam on merchandising and cultural initiatives celebrating their long-lasting sociocultural legacy, including an upcoming retrospective o in October 2023 at Chiostri di San Pietro in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Investigating the relationship between reality and its representation, Achille Filipponi (b. 1981) is an artist and publisher based in Turin. He’s co-founder and editor of Canada and X magazine and editor-in-chief of Axis Axis.
IMAGE COURTESY: THE ARTISTS