Jan Dibbets chooses the space previously occupied by Giulio Paolini in 2002, with sixty fragments of a text written by memory, and Edward Wincklhofer two years later, with an unsettling dais at environmental scale and a constantly whirling circular saw.
“At Ostia’s old Synagogue fantasy awakens the traces from the past and brings them alive. The ruin turns into a building, the walls enwrap space again. Are we still here or were we already there? The fata morgana is constructed on the foundations of its own remains. We wander along reality and go right through the walls. Open very carefully the (non existing) doors and walking tiptoe silently enter the endless space far as the eye can reach. And see although nothing was left it’s all still there.” This is what Dibbets has to say about Sinagoga Ostia Antica. The building, the walls and the space he mentions are evidently neither the originals nor their reconstruction but the scarcely perceptible idea of building, wall and space that make it possible to bridge sidereal distances and establish dialogue between the millennial past and the present. Taking the four surviving columns as a unit of measurement, Dibbets draws a rectangular perimeter in the air at the same height with lengths of white elastic attached to four iron pillars precisely positioned at the four corners of the field. Another two lengths intersecting to form an X act as a virtual wall. In the juxtaposition of the reality of the building in ruins and its presumed mental reality, Sinagoga Ostia Antica constitutes a new version of the “Perspective Corrections” developed by the Dutch artist from 1967– when he produced the first forty specimens at the age of twenty-six after a brief involvement in Abstract Expressionism – to 1969 . As he explains, “What interests me are the levels of reality. We have a certain image of what a real thing is, and then there is another thing which is just as real, I mean in your mind, not visually. All things that are clear are real.”