My manifest poster on the CHEAP festival, pasted on the Masini Street in Bologna, Italy > “CHEAP” INSTAGRAM <
NON VOGLIO / I DON’T WANT TO / NEĆU
A gesture meaning fuck you or fuck off, also an easy way to end a conversation.
URBAN DICTIONARY: “Middle Finger – A finger that’s typically used to tell people to go to hell and/or to fuck themselves by being positioned upright while the other fingers are facing down inside the palm of the hand.
FLICKR PHOTO by EN-RI, mutant and proud – #nonvoglio #ivanaarmanini #bianco #nero #poster #fuck #manifesto #bologna #omino #dito #medio #wall #muro #graffiti #writing
REVIEW: “i like very much new stuff, it has kind of fuck-you-all emotion which probably feel all of us last few days and years in croatia.” milena zajović
CHEAP STREET ART FESTIVAL – ABOUT
Cheap is an independent project promoting street art as a new tool for fuelling urban renewal and investigating local geographies. Born in 2013, Cheap is a yearly festival that involves an international open call and a selection of guests invited to carry out site-specific projects scattered throughout Bologna’s urban landscape and outskirts. Cheap is a grassroots, nomadic entity cultivating the hybridization of expressive languages, supporting participatory pathways and working to collectively re-appropriate spaces where creative energies can be unleashed.
When did the middle finger become offensive?
By Daniel Nasaw/ BBC News Magazine, Washington
… The episode occurred not on a chat show nor in the salons of New York or London, but in 4th Century BC Athens, when the philosopher Diogenes told a group of visitors exactly what he thought about the orator Demosthenes, according to a later Greek historian. The middle finger, extended with the other fingers held beneath the thumb, is thus documented to have expressed insult and belittlement for more than two millennia.
‘Phallic gesture’ – Ancient Greek philosophers, Latin poets hoping to sell copies of their works, soldiers, athletes and pop stars, schoolchildren, peevish policemen and skittish network executives have all been aware of the gesture’s particular power to insult and inflame. “It’s one of the most ancient insult gestures known,” says anthropologist Desmond Morris.
“The middle finger is the penis and the curled fingers on either side are the testicles. By doing it, you are offering someone a phallic gesture. It is saying, ‘this is a phallus’ that you’re offering to people, which is a very primeval display.”
During Sunday night’s broadcast of the Super Bowl, America’s most-watched television programme of the year, British singer M.I.A. extended the finger during a performance of Madonna’s Give Me All Your Luvin’.
The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that German tribesmen gave the middle finger to advancing Roman soldiers, says Thomas Conley, a professor emeritus of communication and classics at the University of Illinois, who has written about the rhetoric of insults. Earlier, the Greeks used the middle finger as an explicit reference to the male genitalia. In 419BC, the playwright Aristophanes puns in his comedy The Clouds about dactylic (finger) rhythm, with a character gesturing first with his middle finger and subsequently with his crotch. The gesture’s origins may extend even further back: male squirrel monkeys of South America are known to gesture with the erect penis, says Dr Morris. The middle finger, which Dr Morris says probably arrived in the US with Italian immigrants, is documented in the US as early as 1886, when a pitcher for the Boston Beaneaters gave it in a joint team photograph with the rival New York Giants …
Protest, rage, excitement –While the middle finger may historically have symbolised a phallus, it has lost that distinctive meaning and is no longer even obscene, says Ira Robbins, a law professor at American University in Washington DC, who has studied the gesture’s place in criminal jurisprudence. “It does not appeal to the prurient interests,” he says.”This gesture is so well ingrained in everyday life in this country and others. It means so many other things, like protest or rage or excitement, it’s not just a phallus.” And he rejects an Associated Press journalist’s characterisation of the gesture as “risque”.”What is risque about it? Maybe the dancing was risque, but the finger? I just don’t see it.”