This work, created in 2010, was my way of processing my school years, long before people started diagnosing themselves on TikTok. Back then it was simply called:
“That boy just can’t sit still. He’s a little Speedy Gonzales!”
Today it’s ADHD, ADD, ADAHS, an alphabet soup for something that was basically just energy. Too much of it. Frustration born from being forced to memorize useless things that never made sense to me.
I was one of those funny restless dudes, running on full throttle, no filter, no brakes, but with a head full of images and ideas, always slightly off-topic. There was no Ritalin for me. (Lucky me! The generation right after mine wasn’t so fortunate)
Just punishments, plenty of them. The standard pedagogy was: “Go stand in the corner. Be quiet. Get out of the classroom” and “Stahlberg, leave the room immediately”
Yes, I was expelled from several schools. But I was flying upward, not downward, because I wasn’t stupid, I was just never guided properly. From secondary school to middle school and beyond, always fighting gravity, against a system that wanted to calibrate me, or better, torture me with mathematics despite dyscalculia. That was my luck: I was too loud to be sedated.
Just passed from one place to another, but I met a few rare teachers who believed in me, even inside the institution, despite all odds.
“I Dream Ritalin” tells exactly that story, the desire not to be normalized with the help of daily psychopharmaceuticals. A child’s head, sculpted from patinated marble, chained to its desk, surrounded by pills, books, a pencil, and the cry:
“When I’m big, I would wish a life without drugs and pressure. Please help me.”
It sounds naive, but it’s brutally honest. It’s the scream of a child who realizes that adults are the real addicts, addicted to control, to order, to measurable performance. Diagnosis upon diagnosis.
We don’t want children who dream, we want functional bodies for the damn Gross National Product. I showed this piece in Milan and Caserta. The reactions were always the same: first shock, then silence.
Some said, “That’s too harsh… but my son takes it too.”
For me it was never just a sculpture, it was a flashback, a small revenge against pedagogy, against the industry of adaptation. I wanted to show what happens when wild thinking gets medicated (the real bill, and the real crisis, will come later, when you’re grown up) and that sometimes it just takes luck or a few good teachers to avoid being chemically switched off.
Today we’re more efficient, quieter, and more broken than ever. Everyone more same. The machines run, the kids swallow, the parents keep functioning, until they too explode, because let’s face it: no one survives without “stuff.”
And somewhere out there, maybe that child, now grown up, is still dreaming of a life without drugs.
Fuck you, Novartis Pharma.
Carrara 2010
