LETTING IT EXIST AS IT IS

Observing and defining the physical and temporal condition of a work

 
“Is it the artist or the scientist in him which is aroused by the Lobelia?"

(from ‘Oaxaca Journal’ by Oliver Sacks)

 
‘There wasn’t, there isn’t, an eclipse, but instead something permanent (even if it is destined to end over time): another dimension that without end or limitation superimposed itself onto the previous one and substituted it (…). It was, rather, a total, complete metamorphosis.’

(from ‘Quaderno a cancelli’ by Carlo Levi)

 
 
Two themes are dealt with in the archive in two fields which are found inside each file-work. They are called: ‘Work Status’ and ‘Year’. The first is the point in which the status of a certain work is defined and the second, which is closely connected to the first, refers to its dating. Together, the two terms describe the physical and temporal condition of a work and are always potentially subject to change.
 
Here in the introduction, I have transcribed two articles which were published under ‘Instructions for Using the Archive’, which I wrote to say what I mean by ‘Status’ and ‘Year’ (dating).
In the individual paragraphs of the chapter, I analyse one by one the different types of ‘Status’ and use a series of works as examples to explain myself more clearly.
 
I am adding a footnote. I have dedicated an entire chapter in ‘Self-portrait’ to one status in particular: the ‘not created’ works, which I have called ‘Imagining’. That is the space that I have given myself in order to allow ideas exist and grow, to ensure that everything that has not yet been made concrete as a work or perhaps never will be, can have the possibility of being considered and continued.
 
 
WORK STATUS IN ARCHIVE – INSTRUCTIONS
In this space the aim is to consider the concept inherent in each work, of time, physicality and imagination, and the possibility that each one has of existing or possibly even disappearing. Here the aim is to attribute to each work its exact condition in a precise moment. This status is always potentially modifiable precisely because the conceptual and material nature of the work is always in constant transformation.
The idea is to give importance to all those works that have never existed physically or existed once but not anymore, or which are still here but have been transformed. I want to think about the possibility that the works can still exist and even in a different way, or the fact that they can always be in progress and potentially regenerated, cancelled, replicated, suspended.
I consider each work as being in a certain sense suspended, unfinished, because I know that for as long as I live each thing can potentially be reconceived, reprised and adjusted. The documentation and the account of my work in my archive are also in perennial change and reconsidered. The archive is the place where each transformation is registered and it makes explicit the fact that each work, even if only in its imagined state, is a given fact that endures beyond everything that can happen to it. It is the space in which the thing can continue to be, even if that thing has dissolved or has never appeared because everything is still an essential trace of the activity of thinking.
 
YEAR (DATING OF WORKS) IN ARCHIVE - INSTRUCTIONS
In this section there is a reflection on the dating of the works, thinking of them on the basis of their temporal nature. In some cases, the moment in which the work began to exist is given, in others the moment in which it was reworked, in others again the date in which it was finished is given. I have to say that symbolically I should have given more importance to the ideation than to the creation and I should have kept in mind the date in which each work was thought of. I would like to have insisted on the moment in which the work began to be in my mind even before it became a reality. Despite the fact that they needed a long period of time to be created, a lot of works already existed for some time in my head.
I realise, however, that the way described is thoughtless, difficult to define as a scientific fact in the caption and I have therefore adopted a more comprehensible and objective system that is described below. I wanted to describe the feeling I experience regarding this question, freeing myself from reviewing possibly all the dating criteria in the future if I should ever find sufficiently valid alternatives.

(Written in 2021)