A short biographical notice:
- Tomaso Guerino Francesco Carnetto, born in 1961,
- his father, a native Bastard (illegitimate son of V. E. Ferdinando Maria Gennaro di Savoia and the daughter of a landowner), died in 1975,
- at this time Tomaso Carnetto was 13 years old,
- with the death of his father, a logical question was given to him:
whether his father was murdered or died in consequence of a natural cause - a question which he never could answer satisfactorily,
- after he had seen the »Honigpumpe«* at the »Documenta« in 1977, he started his collection of formatives, formative clusters and lineations,
- after school in 1979, he spent a sustainable, impressive time in Canada, mostly engaged with the execution of administrative formalities
(commissioned by his aunt),
- back in Germany he was trained as a carpenter and after he became a craftsman he studied Art and Design,
- since 2007, together with his wife he has headed the Academy of Visual Arts, Frankfurt.

Featured

*Joseph Beuys, Honigpumpe I

»The generation of energy means the production of warmth and hence the link with social sculpture.« Joseph Beuys

In 1977, Beuys created a monumental installation for documenta 6, the international exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Entitled Honeypump in the Workplace, it pumped two tons of honey through plastic tubing, using motors lubricated with over 200 pounds of margarine. It was in action throughout the 100 days of the exhibition and Beuys intended it to be seen as a metaphorical circulation system, absorbing and distributing the energy generated by the lectures, discussions, and seminars that were happening during the exhibition.

*Joseph Beuys, Honigpumpe II

»With Honey pump I am expressing the principle of the Free International University working in the bloodstream of society. Flowing in and out of the heart organ – the steel honey container – are the main arteries through which the honey is pumped out of the engine room with a pulsing sound, circulates round the Free International University area, and returns to the heart. The whole thing is only complete with people in the space round which the honey artery flows.« Joseph Beuys

My Father I

The Second Italo-Abyssinian War was a colonial war that started in October 1935 and ended in May 1936.

My Father II

The war was fought between the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy and the armed forces of the Ethiopian Empire (also known at the time as Abyssinia). The war resulted in the military occupation of Ethiopia.

My Father III

On 5 May 1936, the Italian Marshal Pietro Badoglio moved into the capital of Abyssinia, Addis Ababa. My father was trained as a security officer and had to ensure the safety of the supreme commander.

T.C., photographed by his mother, 1976

The visual language is a system of communication using visual elements.

T.C. Portrait, 1986

Speech as a means of communication cannot strictly be separated from the whole of human communicative activity which includes the visual.

Self Portrait, Drawing 1986

The term Language in relation to vision is an extension of its use to describe the perception, comprehension and production of visible signs.

Self Portrait, Photography 1988

Visual units in the form of lines and marks are constructed into meaningful shapes and structures or signs. Different areas of the cortex respond to different elements such as colour and form.

Self Portrait, Drawing 1987

Perception is not a passive recording of all that is in front of the eyes, but is a continuous judgement of scale and colour relationships.

Self Portrait I, Drawing 1988

The perception of a shape requires the grasping of the essential structural features, to produce a Gestalt.

Self Portrait II, Drawing 1988

Visual perception is what allows us to have a true understanding of experience because perception is identical to thinking.

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

My father was born in 1907 as a bastard (in the origin meaning of the word). In 1943, in the small slot between the defeat in Stalingrad and Mussolini's fall, he was send to Germany as a so-called „Fremdarbeiter“ (foreign worker). After the Italians had changed sides and fought with the Allies, my father's status was transformed from a „Fremdarbeiter“ to a „Zwangsarbeiter“ (forced labourer). From 1941, he worked for the CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps), later he was involved in the Gladio-Activities. The first time he married was in 1946. The couple had three daughters. He died in March 1975 at the age of 68.

My mother was born in 1922, raised as the first of seven siblings. During World War II, she worked as an assistant teacher. After the War she studied to be a professional teacher. Her marriage to my father was her second. My mother died in November 2011 at the age of 89.

After school, first I took an apprenticeship as a carpenter, then I studied Design and Visual Arts.

Generally speaking, my work relates to the tension between the individual history and the common history. Because of the fact that – on one side – my father never told us anything about his individual history and – on the other side – that he told me everything during a period of approximately eighteen month when I was about two years old, but it was impossible for me to understand it in an intellectual sense, I had to decipher his story and to find an appropriate way to save the deciphering-process.

To obtain his story and with it my history, I had to collect three kinds of content: first what he has told me, second the historical facts in relation to what he had not told, third my own history. All three kinds had to be understood and grasped as concrete experiences. In addition, I needed the appropriate grammatical and artistic tools to do so. Because of the fact that those tools only partly exist, some I had to complete, others I had to create. To get the tools for collecting and evaluating the collected material (concerning its structural identities), I needed many years.

Before the period of collection started, there was a period of pre-collection from 1977 (two years after the death of my father) until 1979. The collection and evaluation of the historical material and the creation of the needed tools lasted 36 years – from 1979 until 2015.
I needed the period of pre-collection to consider (more instinctively than intellectually) an imagination how the collection could be gathered and stored.
The most important impulse for the pre-collection was my identification of the Honigpumpe (as it was installed at the Documenta in 1977) as a potential tool for narrative recoding. The interpretation of the artist Joseph Beuys* had not interested me, because it seemed to me much to far away from the concrete movements of my body in which my father had stored his story as a heritage for his first-born son. For me the Honigpumpe seemed much more related to a Vitruvian Machine, a construction which directly produces an inseparable combination of words and images out of the movements of the author’s body.

To prevent any misunderstanding; my work is not about unveiling any historical or individual secret but to get deeper into the knowledge about how Existential Notations can be grasped and saved. If we are setting the Existential Notations of ourselves and of those we are related to a structural relation, we will find the origin of any individual and common history.

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

With the elaboration of the tools during the following years, we saw that they are outstandingly useful for the teaching of knowledge about design, art or visual communication and for its practical use.

Since 2007, we (Seyyal and I) have led the Academy of Visual Arts, Frankfurt.