by Alberto Grometto
We were expecting nothing more than an interview. Instead what we got was a Life Lesson. We expected to talk about a song. Instead, we ventured into the hidden depths and meanderings of what must be the True Essence of Art and the Authentic Meaning of Existence. We were sure we were going to talk about Music. Instead we talked about Everything.
Bandana on his forehead. Attentive look, ready. It is the Power of Yin and Yang in his heart, the symbol of his existence, as he says. But who’s him? He’s FULGENS. Fulgens, who by telling us and explaining his life, ends up trying to tell us and explain Life in absolute terms. “Too many masks, too few faces” he says in his song. Well, dear Fulgens, today we can say that You, for all of us Mercutians and for those who can appreciate your music and your art, you are definitely a Face. Because masks, as far as I am concerned, you wore none when we had the pleasure to interview you.
MARCO FULGIDO, pen name FULGENS, in 2018 started working on what he says is the will of his twenties. Call it a song, call it music, call it a project: just call it a journey! Yes, that is what we’re talking about, a journey inside a human being, even before an artist or a man of culture, whom, freed from his masks, chooses to gather all what he’s planted in his life so far and tell everything about himself. After all, one can travel even without taking trains, the most beautiful journey is that of the mind, says our friend Fulgens.
YIN AND YANG. This is the title of the work we’re talking about. The idea of opposite extremes that sooner or later end up meeting and complementing each other has always amazed our dear interviewee, it is a concept he considers extremely everyday, and this is because Yin and Yang are everywhere around Us. Even inside Us, for that matter. Even though we are perhaps mostly unaware of it, everyone has his Sun and
his Moon, his Night and his Day, his Good and his Evil within him. Without the one, there is no other. Black and White are the two most complementary colours possible. Are those the perfect colours? Perfection does not exist, says the illustrious Fulgens, showing off zen wisdom worthy of ancient philosophers and thinkers who made History. But remember that White and Black, he continues, are the two colours of Scripture. You write with BLACK on a WHITE paper. Here’s it: they are made to be opposites but also to stay together. Even the charming, elegant and refined Turin, the city where this work saw the light, a world to which Marco feels he has to “thank you”, is extremely gloomy at times but also cheerful and brilliant from other points of view; there is Yin and Yang in there too.
He started writing it in a moment of fragility, a moment in which everything seemed monotonous, a moment in which he looked around and everything appeared the same. He was in a sort of “bubble of total decadentism”. It seemed to him that the human being no longer had anything new to offer, and not only in music but in the most diverse fields. “It’s sad, I admit it, I foresee a future of marionettes” Fulgens himself states in his piece. How long did you work on it?, we asked him. A lot… too much, he says with a smile. He was still at his fourth year of high school when the idea came to him. Moreover, it is immediately clear how much weight his classicist past played a role in his work, which is the way Marco expresses himself and who he is: “… by now I have subscribed to this desperate classicist mentality” or “i write my Odyssey without a hitch” are just some of these classical bits. If we also throw in a reference to the theatre or the Supreme Poet Dante Alighieri, the picture is complete. The author is in fact a man of culture and naturally a man who loves culture in all its shapes. “Culture is everything, guys” says Fulgens. He admits that attending the classical high school, as hard and difficult as it was, was a blessing and that if he had chosen another type of education, today we would be talking about another ‘Yin e Yang’, and indeed perhaps not at all. Classical high school has influenced his way of being as a person so much.
Beyond school, though, his polar star was certainly his family, mentioned in his song, but who was not informed of “Yin e Yang” until after work was done, just like everyone else. That’s right. In order to realise what he needed to get out, he first had to realise he needed his own space and not talk to anyone about it. Basically, if he had talked about it, notes Fulgens, he would only have raised expectations unnecessarily. The point is that he, affirms with undeniable modesty, is not an artist. But just a guy who needed to communicate something. And to do that he found the most beautiful form of art possible. That is all. But this is anything but ‘that is all’.
Because you see, Dear Fulgens, My Friend, making Art means this, being able to bring out that something that you can’t say what it is. But there is a way to say it. And that way is called Art. So many artists throughout history have taught us that. And you have taught us that too, oh Artist among Artists. That’s how the young Fulgens, even before becoming Fulgens, during that 2018 started to think about his work in utmost secrecy, taking advantage of the silence of the night, his time of highest inspiration, and without touching it during the day.
“A thousand miles i chase a dream, dream
born misunderstood i need it, dream
Cannot explain it fully, fully
What I got in my head and chase it, chase
My Muses are on vacation
Those few confused ideas”
He chased it, run after it, that dream whose realisation he needed, the ability to explain himself, to reach what was inside him. And in the end he reached the product he was looking for, “Yin e Yang”.
The themes he carries with him in that song are many. More than many; somehow infinite. Infinite as only Life can be. It has the flavour of infinity. In addition to those already explored, Fulgens takes on the theme of the dream. “Maybe one day we’ll wake up and this will all just be a dream”. One of his Masters said that, Eminem, who, even if he doesn’t know, says Fulgens, grew up with him. And speaking of Dreams, a fundamental influence and a lightning inspiration came from dear old uncle Sigmund Freud, who with his extraordinary “The Interpretation of Dreams” from 1899 gave the start to psychoanalysis. Another Maestro that visionary madman Luigi Pirandello, and his aforementioned masks. Our Marco is in love with his thoughts. “He got there a hundred years before me”, he jokes ironically. We inevitably and unconsciously change in every circumstance and the way I see you is not the way he sees you which is not the way you see yourself which is not… and everything else. Then, where is the real truth?
Between dreams and masks it took him twenty years to get to know himself, at least a part of himself. Does he not therefore have the impression, at times, that there is little reality around and that he therefore finds himself forced to live with deep ambiguity his Yin and his Yang, which instead is a clear and definite concept that wants there to be a clear definition of the boundaries between Good and Evil, with some Evil in the Good and vice versa, as opposed to the masks and dreams that nullify such defined boundaries? Wow, what a mess! And even that example of acumen and deep empathic intelligence that is the Fulgens says that questions like that cannot be answered. Maybe you can talk about it in a three o’clock in the morning tipsy conversation in which you address the topic of the transience of existence. The real truth is that boundaries are blurred and you often don’t realize where Black ends and White begins, but maybe … he says, giving us hope … it is also right. Let us not set limits or boundaries. But, and Marco says this, who has always been by nature and inclination introverted, one must dare where one can, always. He did. He dared. Without fear of showing his weaknesses, because we are all weak in this world. He dared because his best friend was with him, Music, who always accompanied him hand in hand along the way. He dared and worked on himself, even before working on this piece that he calls “poetic rap,” that is, a rap with a content. He dared with “Yin e Yang,” and he and his life afterwards were never the same.
People only see the end result, as you say. They just see the tip of the iceberg popping out the water, but under that there is an entire huge block of ice. That’s why you hoped, in your own small way, to be able to communicate something big. Well, you made it. So, thank you Fulgens, thank you from the bottom of my heart. We’ll see at your next project, we’ll be there!!!
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