EXTRACTING FROM THE ARCHIVE

Archive as a generating tool

 
‘An overall sifting of problems through the substance that already exists and has developed in us (the tone, for instance).’

From Cesare Zavattini’s ‘Diary’, 30 March 1962

 
Over the span of thirty years, everything happened with fluidity, with no planning, through intuitive movements, where one thing led to another waveringly, continuously going from plunging my hands into the substance-colour to the reasoning that ran alongside it.
Then, in 2010, looking back on everything that had taken shape, I perceived that together, the things that had happened up to that point were like a shapeless magma. And it was then, while starting to work on the archive, that I began a new phase, a new system of reflection. The archive, which has become a means for thinking, not only helped me to understand, to put in order and to name, but also to realise that everything – absolutely everything – had to become part of my world-work. Every single thing had to become a fragment of the whole mass, from the painting to the reasoning behind the painting, from the act of painting to what happens around it, from the central point where the action takes place to the imprints that the passage of the body leaves, from the shapes through which all of this is communicated to the outside to the bureaucratic tools that link it all to the outside world.
An organic structure gradually took shape made up of connected pieces where everything takes on meaning through its aggregates. It reached a point in which, in this order of things, it became necessary to encompass the archive as an object itself within the system-archive, no longer considering it as the container of all the parts, but transforming it into a thinking brain, a device, which in turn could produce new visions and new thoughts.
Through every single paragraph of this chapter, I will show some of those works that were generated through the tool-archive.
 
(Written in 2024)