wu ming,the machine that creates worlds. guillermo zapata & ángel luís lara from LDNMtik
Many people wondered about that group of writers who shocked the European editorial world some years ago with their novel “Q” (Mondadori, 2000), translated to various languages and turned into a successful phenomenon considering the amount of readers it had. Those, at the time named with the pseudonym Luther Blisset, baptized some years ago as Wu Ming (“without name” in Chinese), a label with which “54” was signed with (Mondadori, 2003), are coming back with the Italian edition of their last novel, “Manituana” (2007). Writers that are far from the romantic conception of the creation that mystifies the subject, constant researchers of forms that subvert classical categories and always alert of social movements that alter the new century from below, the collective Wu Ming is still ready to seduce the rigid literary panorama with the production of machines that connect the world we live. Their web (www.wumingfoundation.com) is their new evidence: a space to experiment, in which it is common that the readers become creators by means of cooperation. The recent edition of their last novel in Italy is the perfect topic to converse with them and to know about the new paths of their literary challenges.
Your new project is a trilogy about the American Revolution. Could you tell us how did you come up with that idea?
We have never written a book similar to a previous one. In each of our projects we question our own method of collective work. We were thinking about a uchronic novel (“what would have happened if...”) that took place in America in the second half of the 19th century, at a temporal continuum in which the American Revolution had not taken place yet. Nevertheless, at the end, we decided to “select” the uchronia in a historical novel apparently non-uchronic during a revolutionary period. We wanted to narrate the facts adopting a heterodox point of view: the one by the Iroquoian Indians, the League of the Six Nations or the Haudenosean League, whose meaning is “the villagers that build large houses”. The question that started us in the project was precisely the one that America has asked herself after September 11: why do they hate us? In the beginning the book had three different plots, but we realized that it was going to be impossible to deal with all that Manituana is the first chapter.
You have taken a few years editing this new work...
There is a line in Manituana, almost an aphorism: “when everything happens quickly, learn to be slowly”. We work and reason with long distance perspective; we make projects for a few years. The Luther Blisset Project was a five-year plan (1994-1999). Later on, we faced the first phase of the development of Wu Ming, that goes from “Asce di Guerra” to the novel that we wrote individually, passing by 54. Then, we have taken a sabbatical, two years out of the public sphere and then we have focused on working on Manituana. Actually, we are not in a hurry, fast speed is always a bad counselor. We like civilization’s history and we see our work as a continuity of ancient story-tellers and shamans. We see ourselves in movement, immersed in a big arch of time that goes from the Neolithic to our days.
The parallel stories that have been coming out as “approaches” to Manituana, what is the intention behind them? How do they relate with the rest of the work?
They have been published on our web-site since December of 2005 to March of this year. The goal is “to construct worlds” and to make the book come out from itself. We pretend that both Manituana and the trilogy that Manituana is part of to be only the deep heart of a big trans-mediatic nebula of a lot of “lateral” stories, dramas, digressions, images, sounds and collective constructions.
In the last two years, explicitly political texts that are attached to concrete practices of social movements, as the ones you dedicated to the Geneva mobilizations against the G8 or to the big protest in Florence in the first European Social Forum, have been disappearing from your literary production. What happened to those street narrations?
Only a writer who has distanced himself from reality can be alien to social and political transformations that surround him. The truth is that social movements are living alternative phases: of emergency and visibility first, of immersion and sedimentation later. Now we are in the second phase, not characterized by oceanic protests and a “compact” participation, but by an underground diffusion and localized conflict. It is the moment in which one has to do her work properly, as a production and construction of imaginaries. In 2003, the day after the invasion of Iraq, we published a text that was entitled “Bush will lose the war”. Afterwards we got into Wu Ming laboratory for three years, in order to think of the most ambitious narrative project we have ever immersed ourselves into and that will probably take us until 2011, whose first step is Manituana. It has been a hard period of time in which we have entrust our reflections of what was happening in the world not only to our telematic bulletin (Giap), but also to the narration we were working on. Today Bush is losing the war and we reappear with the first novel of a trilogy dedicated to America. Manituana deals precisely with the war, the American war in particular, from its origins.
Your new project is a trilogy about the American Revolution. Could you tell us how did you come up with that idea?
We have never written a book similar to a previous one. In each of our projects we question our own method of collective work. We were thinking about a uchronic novel (“what would have happened if...”) that took place in America in the second half of the 19th century, at a temporal continuum in which the American Revolution had not taken place yet. Nevertheless, at the end, we decided to “select” the uchronia in a historical novel apparently non-uchronic during a revolutionary period. We wanted to narrate the facts adopting a heterodox point of view: the one by the Iroquoian Indians, the League of the Six Nations or the Haudenosean League, whose meaning is “the villagers that build large houses”. The question that started us in the project was precisely the one that America has asked herself after September 11: why do they hate us? In the beginning the book had three different plots, but we realized that it was going to be impossible to deal with all that Manituana is the first chapter.
You have taken a few years editing this new work...
There is a line in Manituana, almost an aphorism: “when everything happens quickly, learn to be slowly”. We work and reason with long distance perspective; we make projects for a few years. The Luther Blisset Project was a five-year plan (1994-1999). Later on, we faced the first phase of the development of Wu Ming, that goes from “Asce di Guerra” to the novel that we wrote individually, passing by 54. Then, we have taken a sabbatical, two years out of the public sphere and then we have focused on working on Manituana. Actually, we are not in a hurry, fast speed is always a bad counselor. We like civilization’s history and we see our work as a continuity of ancient story-tellers and shamans. We see ourselves in movement, immersed in a big arch of time that goes from the Neolithic to our days.
The parallel stories that have been coming out as “approaches” to Manituana, what is the intention behind them? How do they relate with the rest of the work?
They have been published on our web-site since December of 2005 to March of this year. The goal is “to construct worlds” and to make the book come out from itself. We pretend that both Manituana and the trilogy that Manituana is part of to be only the deep heart of a big trans-mediatic nebula of a lot of “lateral” stories, dramas, digressions, images, sounds and collective constructions.
In the last two years, explicitly political texts that are attached to concrete practices of social movements, as the ones you dedicated to the Geneva mobilizations against the G8 or to the big protest in Florence in the first European Social Forum, have been disappearing from your literary production. What happened to those street narrations?
Only a writer who has distanced himself from reality can be alien to social and political transformations that surround him. The truth is that social movements are living alternative phases: of emergency and visibility first, of immersion and sedimentation later. Now we are in the second phase, not characterized by oceanic protests and a “compact” participation, but by an underground diffusion and localized conflict. It is the moment in which one has to do her work properly, as a production and construction of imaginaries. In 2003, the day after the invasion of Iraq, we published a text that was entitled “Bush will lose the war”. Afterwards we got into Wu Ming laboratory for three years, in order to think of the most ambitious narrative project we have ever immersed ourselves into and that will probably take us until 2011, whose first step is Manituana. It has been a hard period of time in which we have entrust our reflections of what was happening in the world not only to our telematic bulletin (Giap), but also to the narration we were working on. Today Bush is losing the war and we reappear with the first novel of a trilogy dedicated to America. Manituana deals precisely with the war, the American war in particular, from its origins.
