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 |
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