Memorie di un cieco [Memoirs of the Blind], 2010
Microfilm reader, arduino servo motor controller, writing desk Studio B.B.P.R. Olivetti Arco (1963), 35 mm. film, electric wires
123 x 140 x 70 cm.

The images visible on the screen of the reader are captions, annotations, and stamps found on the backs of thousands of photographs collected from Italian and international press archives that refer to history in the broad sense, but also to smaller, forgotten histories. Though evoked by their descriptions, by their enigmatic traces of systems of classification and by the signs of their public existence, the ‘images’ remain, in reality, invisible and therefore lose their quality as simulacra: they can only be imagined by the viewer. The stories told by the captions, at one point inextricably linked to images on their recto, have been separated from and are now the only surviving traces of these images; the only historical ‘indices’ that have reached us, real or false, true or invented, and compose a paradoxical blind iconology of the XXth Century.

Installation view, All I Remember, Magazzino Rome, 2010

Courtesy the artist and Magazzino, Rome