An “age-long vigil watching over leaning
ruins” is the idea developed by Salvadori
in his work Continuo Infinito Presente
for the synagogue of Ostia Antica. The memory
that has preserved the sacral nature of this
place over the centuries is today entrusted
to the secular vigil of a contemporary artist.
Consisting of an iron cable coiled around
a core to create a perfect circle with no
beginning or end, Continuo Infinito Presente
has a long history in Salvadori’s repertoire.
It was conceived in the early 1980s on the
small scale of 22 centimeters and it made
its first public appearance in 1985 at the
Locus Solus gallery in Genoa, hung on the
wall like an icon. This position was maintained
for over ten years until the retrospective
at the Pecci Museum, Prato, in 1997, when
Salvadori decided to transfer it from the
wall into space. The marked a radical shift:
from object of contemplation to object engaged
in dialogue with architectural structure and
the body. The increase in diameter from twenty-odd
centimeters to a few meters altered its “spatial
faculty” substantially. It was shown
in this form in Vienna in 1996, in Milan three
years later, and then in Berlin. The version
presented in the Manifattura d’Arte
Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence, in 2001 confirmed
the connection with architectural structure.
Now five meters in diameter, Continuo
Infinito Presente embraced a column beside
the name Emil Molte written on the wall in
block capitals as a tribute to the German
industrialist who first commissioned Rudolf
Steiner to build a company kindergarten.
In the work at Ostia Antica, the ring is again
made of iron and lies in the main chamber
of the synagogue watched over by the four
surviving columns. It embraces and coagulates
countless stone fragments. One of these belongs
to it like a stone in a ring and another is
amazingly similar to Momento, the
inexhaustible series of lead sheets that Salvadori
has been deftly cutting and folding since
1973 to construct intricate embroideries of
solid and void, light and shadow, all different,
as shown by the walls on which they proliferate.
At Ostia Antica, however, Continuo Infinito
Presente holds a surprise. The riddle
of its construction is revealed in the ruins.
The ends of the cable wound around the core
that gives it shape take its place in the
seventh turn, entwined forever. A place within
the place. It was from there that the people
gathered on the day of inauguration listened
to an exposition of the rationale of Art in
Memory.