Scrittura privata (L’enigma dell’ora), 2002

Sixty fragments of travertine – made from breaking up a sheet on which the artist had transcribed a sentence in ink describing the work itself – are scattered over an outdoor area measuring 60 m2, gradually thinning out as they move outwards. The text, illegible on the fragments, reads: “Sixty fragments, sixty minutes in an hour, in an illegible text written from memory, gathered and dispersed in a 60-m2 area”.
In the artist’s intentions, the meaning of the work lies precisely in its “disappearance”: the multitude of undecipherable fragments, which disperses the original unity of the sheet and of the text transcribed thereon, leave in the field an enigma (as indicated by the title borrowed from a famous painting by Giorgio de Chirico). The illegible writing remains a mystery, literally a “private” script, a secret code.
The scattering of the undecipherable fragments also evokes an archaeological site (the work had in fact been conceived for the Scavi di Ostia Antica), where time that has by now been consumed is perpetuated through the relics of a lost unity.