Italy

CaCO₃

With the perceptive hiatus of the ready made, Deposito pushes the spectator into a place of magical beauty. The storehouse is history’s mysterious space. Ever more accumulated objects, subtracted from the rapid flow of life: temporary storage or residues of entire lives, abandoned fragments, ruins of times past. With dust, indistructable and precious, soon covering all things.

Concealing rather than showing, CaCO₃ transforms the loss into a conquest. The granular material of Soffi (Breaths) and the pieces of opus signinum are the end point of a conceptually defined process. The beginning is the form, the end is hyle, the raw material. In this latter, according to Greek thought, nature is powerfully present. After having arranged the limestone pieces on the surface with masterly skill using the mosaic technique inherited directly from the Byzantines, the aggression occurs. Pressing the reverse button of the creative act with the invasive force of mechanical sandblasting, everything dissolves in a moment, or almost. In the place of tesserae, volumes and pre-established andamento, an eroded landscape appears. At this point the original state is renewed. That primordial shining dust, suspended in the air, in the city where splendour slides, into an unstoppable decline.

text by Maria Rita Bentini