Reis
took up his position on the hill beside the synagogue, where
the white flag of Fabio Mauri had flown two years before,
and erected a landscape of ruins around a massive oak: 21
roughly fashioned columns of brick and concrete with the odd
insertion of wooden fragments.
As he explains, “They may or may not have been part
of a construction and, on seeing them, it is not clear whether
they were made by a skilled mason and then involved in some
destructive event or simply victims of the passing of time.
Then again, these 21 columns, fragile for all their roughness,
may always have been a ruin, perhaps leaving the hands of
their builders on the threshold of life only to experience
the agony of violence and hope in an attempt to reconstruct
a place and reinvent their own memory (the opposite of history).”
If history is in fact a “caravan in the desert”
with a precise route guided and astronomical system of reference,
memory is the remnants it leaves along the way, with which
the artist constructs another history, hazy and out of place,
precarious and temporary. “Observers think they recognize
what they see but are unable to pinpoint the outlines of what
they recognize with any precision and are left with a feeling
of familiarity.” And, concerning the work in the synagogue
of Ostia: “I am a gatherer of memories (…) of
mysteries and signs. It is like being in a hurricane that
sucks everything up: houses, roofs, cars, cats and dogs. And
when the wind changes, it drops all that stuff and goes off
somewhere else, leaving an archeological site (…) that
we rebuild and make again. (…) My work has nothing to
do with authenticity, with being oneself, with uniqueness.
It is about what remains (…). A deep-rooted desire to
survive, perhaps.”. |
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