I am an Astronautic Mining Engineer in the mental system, and also a Colonel of the Astral and terrestrial mining Astronautic. This is my mining key: 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900. Copper. Red, yellow. Light and sound have the same length of course. The Earth stands still, and the stars circulate over a part of the Earth. I don’t have anything else to say but goodbye. Yours, N.O.F.4. —Fernando Oreste Nannetti

Right after Fernando Oreste Nannetti (1927, Rome, Italy–1994, Volterra, Italy) was born, his father left home. When he was seven years old, his mother abandoned him in a charitable institution. Three years later, Nannetti was transferred to a psychiatric facility for minors, where he lived for five years. At age twenty-seven he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and four years later he was sent to the psychiatric hospital in Volterra, Italy, where he remained for fourteen years. Nobody ever visited him or replied to his postcards.

There, every day for nine years (1959–1961 and 1968–1973), Nannetti engraved several walls of the inner courtyard of the establishment, covering the surface for over two hundred feet. This monumental book of stone, now gone, was decrypted by Pier Nello Manoni—thanks to the detailed photographs he took in 1979—and by Aulo Guidi and Aldo Trafeli. The latter was a hospital attendant who established contact with Nannetti. Trafeli explained that Nannetti “was always alone. He didn’t fit in with life in the hospital here. He wrote on the wall with the buckle of a vest, which used to be on the patients’ uniforms.” Nannetti first outlined a page on the wall and then filled up this zone with texts and drawings. This creation, wrote Antonio Tabucchi, tells of “Nannetti’s odyssey and his journey to Ithaca. He talks about his imaginary family, whose people are all ‘tall,’ ‘tanned,’ with a ‘Y-shape nose.’ The text also alludes to Genesis, with a cosmography, a fantastic description of the sky, stars, and planets. Then come the horrors of war, mysterious deaths, and pain caused by loss. Persuaded to be connected to supernatural presences, Nannetti poetically restores his exchanges with the interstellar universe.” He claims to be guided by a “Catotique Magnetic Antenna,” and depends on a telepathic system.

Nannetti engaged in a relationship with other-worldliness rather than speaking with those in his immediate surroundings. He invented an exclusive dialogue, encrypted and almost secret. Manoni suggested that “while he laboriously engraved, Nannetti reflected on himself. One feels the contradiction of someone who clings to an obstacle difficult to overcome—the wall that acts as a barrier, that separates, that protects, and the wall that helps to move beyond, to escape.” On one of these sections, Nannetti wrote: “All the world is mine ◆ Nannettolicus ◆ saint with ◆ Photoelectric ◆ cell.” And also: “As ◆ a ◆ Free ◆ Butterfly ◆ I am ◆ Everything ◆ the ◆ World ◆ is mine and ◆ I made ◆ everyone ◆ Dream.”

Adapted from Valérie Rousseau, “Fernando Oreste Nannetti” in Valérie Rousseau (ed.), When the Curtain Never Comes Down: Performance Art and the Alter Ego (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2015).

 
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