Aldo Runfola

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March 22, 2010

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after Lenz (a novel)

For far too long I have cultivated the dream and ambition of writing a different kind of book – one without boring description, dialogue, characters, convinced that these are useful only to tell a story, as wallpaper. I had in mind the story of a way of being and feeling, not to undertake a career as a writer. The book I wanted to write despite everything, to which I dedicated time and confused aspirations with the obstinacy of a fixed idea, was supposed to be unique. Often, even cyclically initiated, it is the book that I never wrote. I remember the beginnings, that first line thick with expectations. If I managed to gather into a single image everything that was worth saying, I would stop, satisfied. I’d push away the notebook and close my eyes. I would appeal to the senses, more than to thought. I had to perceive the wind, the chiming of the clock, in order to describe the situation, to enter into the feelings of the protagonist, to let myself be absorbed by the word...

Image

The image the richness of which ows a debt to the word that has the task of plunging the depth, the symbolic image, even didactic in extreme cases, does not render over time a good service either to images or to words, to the social organization from which it has sprung and to the concept. In a certain sense, it takes advantage of the unspoken that it ideally contains in order to implicity refer to all that might be said about it. Blackmailing by definition, it extorts its own content under threat of denouncing the inability to understand, the intellectual narrow mindedness of the person observing it. The intrinsic limitedness of the image comes back like a boomerang against it, forcing it to establish an immediate link between the visible and the invisible, to bet on this last element, precisely that which in the image, it claims, constitutes the truly significant and vital aspect, insofar as it expresses its irradiative force. Therefore the blackmail becomes complicity, the stable at...

Untitled 2011/project for a gallery in Berlin

Dear T., let me try to be more accurate about the project. There is some theatrical aspect of course; it refers to the ‘live’ performance only, to a single element not to the entire environment of the installation; its final configuration should include the recorded voice, declaiming both texts, as well as the structure with the clouds, the desk lit by the lamp, and a large scale projection - no sound - of the man greeting the public, either coming or leaving. This echoes a work I made years ago in Venice (2004) consisting of a wall paper showing a migrant winding his watch and two neon signs, one at the entrance, one at the exit, saying “welcome” - “goodbye”. The actual performance is, as it originally was, a lecture. The actor’s function is to emphasize what’s happening as something belonging to former times no longer existing. So, in the same way the Jukebox evening at Kolbe was not a concert but the memory of all the concerts one may have listened to, this lecture has to ...

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