The Mediterranean is warm yet feels sad this early spring morning. Its son, Alessandro (Alex) Caldiero died yet his brilliance and vitality continue.
While my heart is with his family and close friends, those of us not as close still feel the loss. I see it in the sad palms, their fronds turning down, and the many shades of funeral gray in the clouds, as well as the suffocated color of the sea.
Alex was my colleague at UVU. I believe we arrived the same year. I was excited to be at a place that could appreciate Alex’ code breaking and reworking ways that were orthagonal to Utah’s academic culture’s rigidity and pretensions.
He was sharp and bright, lemon among green beans, anchovies in a world of funeral potatoes.
Instead of emphasizing bound and published texts, Alex spoke words, like those on this page, only spoken.
They then shifted The become less words and more sound. The connection with meaning would fade, not all at once but as Alex went on.
Sound transformed into an outline of itself and then even more primal into grunts or maybe strikes on a jaw harp, reducing even further to a single sound and then silence until sound again and so on.
While it lost referential meaning, it still maintained and created other contextual and metaphysical meanings that floated like the images in the heat of a summer road.
First time I heard him, I was captivated by his boldness, his artistry, and the excitement of the performance.
This was while I was at Brigham Young University in the early nineties. People I knew had been speaking about this performer, Alex Caldiero. They were fascinated and thrilled but did not know what to make of him. To them, his performance was entertainment, as if he were an intriguing clown—that troubled me.
I found his performance serious and intellectually engaging, but even if he had been just clowning it was masterful. In worlds I am familiar with as an anthropologist, clowning is generative, it is part of the creation and recreation of the cosmos. It is sacred.
In this sense, Alex was close to a shaman, a priest, certainly in the way he could mobilize the sacred sounds of life and words and create sacred space through his art.
His work intrigued me, without my being able to articulate why. But they quickly started making sense in my mind trained in issues of semiology, the study of meaning and its making.
Rather than showing something through belabored phrases and formal paragraphs, Alex practiced mimesis, the art of making the thing appear before us and change as we watched and listened.
His art was poetry, but not just. It also relied on music not unrelated to minimalist performances, where sound appears, takes form with repetition and rhythm, variations in pitch, and then changes.
Alex’s performances continued to delight me and stimulate my mind and soul.
More than anything, I became friends with him through running into each other in the hall, almost daily. Sometimes we just said ciao, other times we talked, and sometimes our conversations were extended and involved.
Alex was real in a way I found refreshing. He was human and lived, pained. He enjoyed, sighed, celebrated, and mourned. He was lemon—sharp, acidic—and yet able to transform even sweetness into something greater.
My Spanish (and very little Italian) provided a bridge for us in language and the worlds behind the words due to the similarity of Romance tongues, even as far removed as Tuscany (Italian) or Sicily (Sicilian—his native tongue) or My Mexican and Andean Spanishes.
We shared something in that I cannot define: a spirit, a view of life, a gusto, a tragic sense—the sighing of the winds on cliffs and crags, the joy of first flowers in spring, wailing with loss, calling bullshit when needed.
It stood out against the wall of Utah’s Anglo-Danish, Mormon avoidance of conflict and difference, preference for speaking back stage about people and issues rather than direct address, a punctilious niceness like a tea cup which held only half as much tea because of all its un-mended breaks, and one that is unrelentingly bourgeois. A world that seals itself off from Mediterranean storms that beat the land, energy that rises from the sea with the roar of bulls and charges, a testosterone rawness.
Alex was Siciliano, even though passed through New York and Utah. And, he was avant garde.
He was apprenticed into that tradition and cultivated it. It's an art that runs cross wise against careerism and middle-class pretentiousness in its exploration of origins, of authenticity, its attempt to find frontiers and break the limits of the ordinary, even in its base where sound and meaning, signifier and signified are joined, bringing together other sets of not-the-sames in chains of connections that Alex could follow.
Well, the Mediterranean is in mourning this morning and I imagine Timpanogos and Utah Lake are also suffering his departure.
I can just say. “Grazzî, Alex, pi l'anni di culligialità e amicizia. Vivirai 'ntra mia finu a quannu avirò fiatu. Ora cadunu lacrimi e mi scuttu.
