Along the portico
of Pius IX lined with ancient shops, Il dormiente
catches us by surprise, a living and unexpected presence
that accompanies us invisibly in the form of breathing.
A spotless white bed rumpled by a human presence, the only
visible sign of which is a lock of hair emerging from the
embroidered linen sheets. Disorientation and disquietude
are engendered not so much by the distance between a private
image and an open, stately, ruined environment as by the
illusionistic nature of the image itself. This illusionism
is not a simulacrum of reality, as in classical perspective,
but the evocation of an intimate, familiar context that
is violated and exploited every day by the media for advertising
and commercial purposes “Sleep is the real battlefield
for me (…) a sort of ritual, a personal liturgy of
my own generating presences that encounter the public. It
will be the same on this occasion. The presence I torment
myself to produce, to make “appear”, is the
symbol of what animates the memory. Memory exists in presence,
in ‘beingthereness’: the memory I’m talking
about is the white bed of innocent death, always present
in its vital breath.”
