Spheres and Strolls: The Experience of Immanence in Buongiorno, Michelangelo

In the film of 1968 Buongiorno, Michelangelo, Ugo Nespolo shows us the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto who, after shaving looking at one of his mirror paintings, walks through the streets of Turin bringing with him a big sphere made of newspapers. This senseless object creates scandal, entertains, produces unexpected reactions and relationships, transforming the artist's walk into a small ode to gratuity, ironic and playful. At the end of the film, the protagonist becomes a giant rose (another Pistoletto’s work) that -thanks to the editing- sometimes even seems to be her own life. Stressing the aimless and frantic movements in the film, a movement whose gratuity is enhanced by the mysterious objects that are protagonists, the article wants to interpret this work by Nespolo focusing on the theme of the walk. Starting from the figure of the flâneur, passing through Dadaist’ visits, Surrealism, to Situationist International, strolling without a goal in the city often constituted in the history of art and thought a radical and meaningful gesture. The work of Nespolo is part of this line, possessing its playfulness, but also a breaking aspect against ordinary experience conditioned by the usefulness. The sphere’s life shown in the film becomes an example of "unprogrammed life", as a life "invented and recorded at the moment", as the artist himself stated. Starting from this theoretical core, I would like to link the "plotless narrative" at the center of this film to the idea of immanence proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari