The ‘Diarytheque’ was the first ‘Archiver’ to be built. It was created in 2008 when I still didn’t know exactly what it was, from when I started to use the term ‘Diaries’ for those sticks of wood that I painted first in an unmindful way in 2004 and then systematically from 2005.
In the early years I let the ‘Diaries’ dry on the rungs of a sculpture-ladder that an artist friend had briefly left in storage in my studio. When the friend came back to take it away, I had to come up with a new structure to store the sticks of colour. The structure came about thus, broadly based on my friend’s structure, transforming it and adapting it to my content. The shape that had been generated by chance led to another based on my needs.
At first my object, which I had called a ‘Diary-holder’, consisted of a few shelves on which I stored my ‘Diaries’, at first laid out horizontally and then vertically in the way they are kept today. When I aligned them like that, they immediately created space for more material and imagining that I would store them again, I decided to order enough to have a surface to paint on that would last a lifetime. I calculated the more or less average duration of the life of an Italian woman of my generation. (Let’s not forget that I am always ready to modify or duplicate the object should my life continue. It is always the artistic object that adapts to life and not the other way around.)
So in 2011 when defining the ‘Diarytheque’ I thought that I would never be separated from the ‘Diaries’ and that from that time on all of them (the ones in my possession; not those that had been sold) would be contained inside it.
In 2019 in Venice there was exceptional ‘acqua alta’ flooding. It entered my studio and even though it did not touch any painted surface, the fear that it could happen in the future led me to thinking about raising all of the ‘Archivers’ off the floor. The ‘Diarytheque’, which already nearly reached the ceiling, needed to be lowered by three shelves. I can’t deny that this decision to lower the structure was pretty painful and brutal. I was scared I was shortening the length of my life, or rather that I was eliminating space that I could have covered with my artistic gesture during my life span. However, another feeling very gradually bloomed and I realised that I was supporting the rhythm of the formation of the colour that had already gradually settled over time at a pace of three or four panels a year. I realised that I had too many sticks still to fill and I wanted to keep within the calculation of an average life and not go over the hundred-year mark, so it was the right call to lower the quantity of material. Therefore, the right thing to do was to add a diary to each shelf and eliminate the excess.
Then, when the decision to amputate had been made and I found myself standing before the new monolith in October 2020, the impression was that of having before me a more proportioned object more in harmony and alignment with the other two, the ‘Infinite Painting’ and the ‘Sedimentary’, which came after it.
 
(Written in 2021)