I arrived in L’Aquila in the late afternoon, in the middle of winter. The idea was to make a preliminary visit and try to begin to understand something about a situation that would otherwise be difficult to grasp from afar. That evening we went to dinner, and the following morning we visited the museum; I then took the afternoon to walk around.
Once the obligatory stops were out of the way, I was able to start wandering at leisure.
Walking along one of those fences that still delimit the ruined areas, I reached a district once devoted to evening entertainment, or so I believe. On the windows of the pubs, the signs advertising special offers on those shots that were so popular in the late 2010s were still legible, reopening a series of memories, each with its own dedicated shiver. At a certain point, the block that houses this row of bars interrupts the continuity of the wall with a sequence of arches framing a portico. Here, the fence stands a few metres away from the wall. Inside the portico, the atmosphere is half-lit, and the scant light filtering through the mesh of the galvanised fence makes the air denser, almost imprecise. The reverie suddenly turns into an intuition when my gaze finds a shrine in the semi-darkness of this hollow space. A very approximate suggestion, coming from some recess of being, assures me that the contents of the shrine are still: frozen in time, always identical to themselves.
The following morning, on the train home, I tried to give order to what I had seen. I thought of the only two possibilities of being, yes or no; and I thought of the boundaries that delimit those places where measure is no longer of any use, time included. Here, having reached this point, perhaps there is not much more to add. The work came about somewhat like this, searching within a shade of black. I think we lack the logical categories with which to indicate voids, and so we end up filling them with something else. Perhaps that is as it should be, continuing to tame absences by inventing entities: thus the absence of light becomes darkness, that of life becomes death, and so on.