His father — a native bastard (the illegitimate son of V. E. Ferdinando Maria Gennaro di Savoia and the daughter of a landowner) — died in 1975, when Tomaso Carnetto was 13 years old. With his father’s death arose a haunting question: was it murder, or the consequence of natural causes? It is a question he has never been able to answer satisfactorily.

After seeing Joseph Beuys’ Honigpumpe* at Documenta in 1977, he began his lifelong collection of “formatives,” formative clusters, and lineations.

Following school in 1979, Carnetto spent a formative period in Canada, largely engaged with administrative formalities commissioned by his aunt. On returning to Germany, he trained as a carpenter. After qualifying as a craftsman, he went on to study Art and Design.

Since 2007, together with his wife, he has directed the Academy of Visual Arts, Frankfurt.

To say it in my own words: I was born in 1961.

My father was born in 1907 as a bastard — in the original sense of the word. In 1943, in that narrow slot of time between the defeat at Stalingrad and Mussolini’s fall, he was sent to Germany as a so-called Fremdarbeiter (foreign worker). After Italy changed sides and fought with the Allies, his status shifted from Fremdarbeiter to Zwangsarbeiter (forced labourer). From 1941 onward, he worked for the CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps), and later he was involved in Gladio activities. He married for the first time in 1946 and had three daughters. He died in March 1975 at the age of 68.

My mother was born in 1922, the eldest of seven siblings. During World War II, she worked as an assistant teacher; after the war she studied to become a professional teacher. Her marriage to my father was her second. She died in November 2011 at the age of 89.

After school I first trained as a carpenter, then went on to study Design and Visual Arts.

Generally speaking, my work relates to the tension between individual history and common history. On the one hand, my father never told us anything about his personal story; on the other hand, he told me everything in the span of about eighteen months, when I was two years old — at an age too young to grasp his words intellectually. Thus, I was left with the task of deciphering his story and finding an appropriate way to preserve the process of deciphering itself.

To obtain his story — and with it my own — I had to collect three kinds of content: first, what he told me; second, the historical facts connected to what he withheld; third, my own lived history. All three had to be understood and treated as concrete experiences. For this, I needed the right grammatical and artistic tools. Since such tools only partially existed, some I had to complete, others I had to invent. It took many years to create the tools for collecting and evaluating the material in terms of its structural identities.

Before the period of systematic collection began, there was a time of pre-collection, from 1977 (two years after my father’s death) until 1979. The collection and evaluation of the historical material, together with the creation of the necessary tools, lasted thirty-six years — from 1979 until 2015. The pre-collection was necessary in order to form, more instinctively than intellectually, an imagination of how such a collection might be gathered and stored.

The most important impulse during this pre-collection came when I saw Joseph Beuys’ Honigpumpe at Documenta in 1977. I identified it as a potential tool for narrative recoding. Beuys’ own interpretation did not interest me, as it seemed too far removed from the concrete movements of my own body — the very movements in which my father had deposited his story as an inheritance for his first-born son. For me, the Honigpumpe was much closer to a Vitruvian machine: a construction capable of producing an inseparable combination of words and images directly from the movements of the author’s body.

To prevent any misunderstanding: my work is not about unveiling historical or individual secrets, but about deepening knowledge of how Existential Notations can be grasped and preserved. If we set the Existential Notations of ourselves — and of those to whom we are connected — into structural relation, we will find the origin of every individual and common history.

My motivation for working as a lecturer (I began in 1990, with courses in computer-based design) was from the beginning the definition and creation of the grammatical, artistic, and technical tools needed for the collecting and storing of Existential Notations.

As these tools developed over the years, we found that they proved exceptionally useful for teaching knowledge of design, art, and visual communication — and equally for their practical application.

Since 2007, together with my wife Seyyal, I have directed the Academy of Visual Arts, Frankfurt.