Distributor Central Books has stock of Vogliamo Tutto on hand – UK fans of Balestrini and Brit autonomistas can now ask local bookshops to order it.
Vogliamo Tutto
Vogliamo Tutto among Australian Book Review’s best books of 2014
Critic Andrew Fuhrmann names Vogliamo Tutto among his best books of 2014 in the December issue of Australian Book Review, describing it as “the most engrossing new fiction I have read this year”.
FIAT workers’ daily life in photos: exhibition
FIAT, Grandi Motori.
Photo: Stefano Robino
Photographer Stefano Robino documented life in the factories and streets of Torino and Milano in beautiful black and white photos that show the post-war rebirth of Italy as an industrial power. More than 40 original prints of his photos are on display at the Centro Culturale di Milano from November 25, 2014 to February 8, 2015. The photos show many of the locations where events in Vogliamo Tutto took place, including the Grandi Motori (above), where huge naval diesel engines were built.
Vogliamo Tutto in Singapore
Vogliamo Tutto is now on sale at Singapore’s Books Actually, a lovely little bricks-and-mortar shop in Tiong Bahru.
The old art deco residential neighbourhood has recently got an injection of something good with the opening of Books Actually as well as Forty Hands Coffee.
Translator Matt Holden: on the radio, on Vogliamo Tutto
Vogliamo Tutto translator Matt Holden talks about the book with David McLean, host of 3CR radio’s Published Or Not.
Vogliamo Tutto: The Age short fiction Pick of The Week
Vogliamo Tutto: reviewed in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald
Vogliamo Tutto is “a surprisingly topical novel” says Fairfax reviewer Cameron Woodhead in a short review in Spectrum on October 4 , published in The Saturday Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Woodhead made the novel his pick of the week. He says the translation is “bracing”, and he finds it cheering that a small Melbourne publisher is the first to publish Vogliamo Tutto in English.
Balestrini: How I Wrote Vogliamo Tutto
Nanni Balestrini talks at length in this il Fatto Quotidiano video about the time he spent around the strikes and other actions at Fiat’s Mirafirori plant in Torino in 1969 – and how this lead to the creation of Vogliamo Tutto. In Italian, no subtitles
A taste:
“This phenomenon was a central fact in the history of Italy. It was the great movement of transformation of the Italy of the early 1960s, what we call the economic miracle that transformed Italy. These thousands, these hundreds of thousands who migrated from the south to the north completely changed the structure of this country; they changed our way of life, they changed the faces of our cities, and they also changed the Italian language: before, we all spoke dialect in different parts of Italy. Florentine Italian was used on rare occasions by few people, and it was necessary to invent a common language so we could understand each other … a writer could not ignore this, could not fail to involve himself in this phenomenon.”
Toni Negri: “We want” is not the same as “We’d like”
Antonio Negri, writing in L’alfabeta2, on the power of “Vogliamo tutto” as an expression of political desire
I want is not the present tense of I’d like; it’s a different tense, a different power. But Toni, you’re playing the martyr, you’re repeating some melancholy refrain! That isn’t true. That difference between I want and “I’d like” is substantial. If you decline “I’d like”, “we’d like”, you don’t escape conditionality; but if you say I want, we want, a different sensation of power is born in you that allows you to desire without the fear – or rather the certainty – that you will do yourself harm. An old friend used to say: “Vogliamo tutto – we want everything”. Was he mad? He would have been if he had said: “We’d like everything.” In that case, everything was power and wealth: But you’re just jealous, the bosses would have replied. With “Vogliamo Tutto – we want everything”, though, we went damned close to those goals that we desired. And even if we didn’t win, we at least gave them heaps, those who pretend not to hold power, but who grasp it so close – and who incite us to desire it by expressing a series of “I’d likes” that are never realised.
…
– from Toni Negri, L’erba vorrei
Potere Operaio #2 in the launch vitrine
Designer Warren Taylor put together this display of old Italian editions of Vogliamo Tutto, plus issue #2 of Potere Operaio (bought from Ebay in Italy) for the launch at Monash University Museum of Art.
Vogliamo Tutto: An old rallying cry for a new century
“More and more the automation of production, and also the possibility in general of trusting almost every type of work and activity to machines and computers, requires a laughably small quantity of human labour power. Therefore why shouldn’t everyone profit from the wealth produced by machines and from the time freed from labour? Today, absurdly, work that is no longer necessary continues to be imposed because only through this is it possible to conceive of the distribution of money, allowing the continuation of the cycle of production and consumption and the accumulation of capital. Continue reading
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