Arendtian Sardines

04-17-2024

Scholar Gabriele Parrino, who was a visiting a scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center this spring, wrote about an "unprecedented event" which occurred in the Italian city of Bologna in November 2019. "Against the discriminatory policies of former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini," he writes, "four very different people, represented by Mattia Santori, began to sing in Piazza Maggiore. Within a few hours, this single chant became a call that grew into a crowd of six thousand people. In a couple of days, the new phenomenon of the 6000Sardines spread throughout the country. Journalists across Italy described it as a 'joyful,' 'hopeful,' and communal event 'moved by feelings of humanity.'"

Parinno explores how this spontaneous political collective is the perfect "Arendtian paradigm: a group of young people singing and dancing together, without any political affiliation, inherently anti-fascist,¹ free to exist as a plurality that thrives on the sheer power of their physical presence in the streets, animated by a simple desire for public happiness." Later though, he spells out how "the nascent democracy of these ‘Arendtian sardines’ tragically failed to take the necessary step of organizing its spontaneity,³ and because of their anti-institutional choices, it lost its initiative power."

Parrino details the rise of these Arendtian Sardines, weaving in the Arendtian sensibility that infused the gathering:

Granting that this was not a black or white situation in the Italian debate on immigration policy, there is to say that this dichotomic position was still strong enough to affirm that hatred, xenophobia, and racism were generating a general sense of uneasiness and distress throughout the political scene.¹¹ And, as a response, Mattia Santori, Andrea Garreffa, Roberto Morotti and Giulia Trappoloni decided that they could no longer remain in this state of uncertainty and silence. Around that simple table that nevertheless “unites and separates people at the same time” (Arendt 1958, 52), they shared their personal concerns about this humanitarian crisis, and they immediately transformed them into a political commitment and practical action against the neo-fascist discriminatory rhetoric of the Italian government. 

Namely, this sudden awareness was also triggered by a contingent fact. The Lega, the most important party of the time and the strongest representative of right-wing values, organized an event in Bologna – where the 6000Sardines were born – at the PalaDozza, to announce Lucia Borgonzoni as its candidate for president of Emilia Romagna. The PalaDozza is a famous sport-center that seats 5570 people. The founders of Sardines wanted to do something on the same day that would give everyone the opportunity not only to raise their voices, but also to create a freer political space that would surpass that number. And as it happens, numbers play a very crucial role in the distorted Italian way of making propaganda. In pictures, videos, or reportages, often spammed all over the internet, politicians always claim that Oceanic masses participate in events like the rally in Bologna, when the factual reality often proves the exact opposite: sparse participation and total loss of political experiences.¹²
The Sardines had in mind a different approach. Searching for an immediate dimension that would entice people in action, they publicized their idea in the most widespread place in our democracies today: social networks. Thanks to a Facebook post that said that they will be in Piazza Maggiore “without a flag, without a party, and without causing offense”, they launched “the first ichthyic revolution in history” by “having a big party” (Garreffa et al. 2020, 8-9). With no strings attached to a specific policy, all that matters for them was the internal and shared need to express freedom publicly.¹³

This surging and free-spirited revolution began on November 14, 2019, at 8:30 p.m., when the space of the appearance of the 6000Sardines came out. It became quickly an ever-expanding political sphere that included everyone near it. A collective experience produced by the powerful act of the Sardines in peaceful rebellion. In this sense, what motivates an Arendtian understanding of this situation starts to be clearer. It was not an anti-sovereign revolt aimed at the reintroduction of a new form of rule (replacing Salvini with a more progressive leader), but the Sardines were the catalysts of a kind of power “that is realized only where word and deed have not separated, where words are not empty and deeds are not brutal, where words are not used to disguise intentions but to reveal realities, and deeds are not used to hurt and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities” (Arendt 1958, 199). Relativized in Salvini’s attempt to propose a more authoritarian State, Italian sovereignty was nevertheless challenged by the Sardines’ “manyness, […] a multitude whose majesty resided in its very plurality” (Arendt 1963, 93) that brought again into the world the thriving experience of collective joy and public connection. 

Accordingly, it was as if the 6000Sardines taught an Arendtian lesson in politics to the Italian population that, in that critical period, was thirsty of fresh and democratic events. The Sardines created the space that happens “wherever people are together in the way of speaking and acting” (Arendt 1958, 200): the same circumstances that precede all institutional forms and have the power to counter them critically. That evening in Bologna demonstrated that at the heart of their festive political demonstration everyone was joined in a concerted performance. A performative act in which, even if compacted into a plurality, every single fish among the many had the chance of displaying its own ‘uniqueness’ through a reciprocal act of freedom expressed in singing, dancing, and chanting in the streets. Being a sardine meant that finally the power to oppose an oppressive and apolitical form of government was regained and it also gave to everyone the occasion to feel the meaning of public happiness¹⁴ and, for some of them that never experienced publicity, the very first opportunity to came into the world as political actors.¹⁵
In sum, organizing the 6000Sardines movement has revived a buried hope for the salvation of two important factors that have been lost in the social arena that undermined the political as such¹⁶: the rediscovery of the meaning of politics in a post-democratic and virtual age,¹⁷ and the realization of what can happen when individual subjects actively participate in a restored and secure public dimension for the sake of their own freedom of action and speech. But why, after all, choose the sardine as their representative animal? Are they weak and easy to prey?

…yes, the sardine. A small and defenseless fish that is never alone. It moves in shoals, a big ensemble of fishes narrowed together that swim compactly, united, which is what we aspire to be: a mass of people stronger than a one man ruling that geminates hatred and divide. As Erri De Luca reminded us, “the sardines, when they feel some tuna under them, create a big balloon and the surface of the water shines with sparks”. (Garreffa et al., 2020, 8)

Thanks to this brief description made by the founders themselves, the ‘flock of sardines’ figures as the most apt metaphor for an Arendtian movement that was able to act and thus to “reach into the extraordinary” (Arendt 1958, 205). They gave an example of what an association of people, harmless in their singularity (if not exactly capable of using violence, which is the main characteristic of loneliness),¹⁸ can do when a one-man rule tries to replace brutality with power. The sardines were a living statement of what power is and of its potentiality. While mainstream politics denied any kind of countermeasure and insisted again on authoritative rule – this happened in the PalaDozza, where everyone was confronted with the reality of an electoral campaign, represented by a Salvini and the Lega, who wanted to impose a leader that would decide the entire destiny of its voters – Mattia Santori and all the other Sardinian founders might have reminded us once again that “power [...] springs between men” (Arendt 1958, 200) and that democracy can only work if this energetic dimension remains at its center. Sadly, relying totally on this unconstrained character, as we will see, tends to obliviate another necessary ontological quality that defines democracy and political participation. If the Sardines’ movement really wanted to change the current of the sea of democratic politics, this kind of forgetfulness produced by the eventfulness of their disposition needed a proper relation with an institutional form that never came to be.

This article was first published on HannahArendt.net in December 2023. You can read the rest of Parrino's article, including a deep analysis of the "post-event situation of the Italian movement," here.