Massimo Bartolini offers this explanation of Apertura: “The door makes permeable a place designed as impermeable. If a door opens and closes, it is an open door and the place is permeable.” His chosen location is the gate by the synagogue in the fence around the archeological area. It is a service entrance used seldom and only by authorized personnel. It could, however, provide direct access to a place that, given its distance from the heart of the settlement, can only be reached intentionally. Bartolini does not replace the existing mechanism but tampers with it so that it opens and closes all the time. “The door is deactivated, dazed by the acceleration of the cycle of opening and closing, doing a whole year’s work in one day. If closing is to be, it must be permanent, opening only for an instant.” He continues: “Deactivation through hyperactivation. Perhaps we in the West are not yet so hyperactive as to deactivate ourselves and allow the other world to enter.” Bartolini’s artistic vision is based on disrupting the functions, codes and meaning of the elements brought into play, above all inhabited spaces like rooms, above all doors and windows. Ostia Antica is no exception. If the closed gate keeps visitors away from the synagogue, it becomes permanently accessible through Bartolini’s small act of sabotage. The message may be that art works toward opening and dialogue. “A gate like that, made in order to stay closed but instead set in constant motion, presents itself as a mistake, a sabotaged architectural structure, dazed, funny, and disturbing. It occurs to me that this gate lets invisible people and things through.” The subtle and metaphorical reference is to the Day of Memory and the opening of the gates at Auschwitz: “Those gates opened just the once for everyone. You went in and never came out or came out and never went back in.” And so that bewildered gate is like a mirage of the freedom dreamed of by the prisoners in the camp but also by all the human beings subjected to abuse and injustice, convention and conformity: Auschwitz as an emblem of discrimination, persecution, and extermination