WHAT TURNS X INTO A TRACE?
WHAT REMAINS OF X AS TRACE?
A trace is residual information in a medium as it interacts with the object of inquiry. The properties of that medium, and the conditions of the experiment, shape what is recorded. Object and trace do not coincide: the object may be absorbed, destroyed, or dispersed. Its existence in itself — prior to any registration — has no operative status within the trace, since what the trace records is an event irreducible to any other form of access. What was taken as known proves otherwise.
One line of the work proceeds from that loss, treating writing itself as loss, as trace. It accepts that what lies behind a name may in fact be unreachable. Structure is then privileged over content, and illegibility is recognised not as a failed or partial attempt, but as an autonomous, complete, and primary state.
The loop thus closes: language and matter share the same instability. If nature admits a textual reading, writing can be addressed as a theory of measurement. The object we imagine behind, or within, a sign is approached only through further signs — verbal, mathematical, visual, physical, computational — yet none of these coincides with it. Each reconstructs, displaces, or models only a part of it.
What follows is therefore always improper: we do not investigate objects through signs, but signs through other signs.
One line of the work proceeds from that loss, treating writing itself as loss, as trace. It accepts that what lies behind a name may in fact be unreachable. Structure is then privileged over content, and illegibility is recognised not as a failed or partial attempt, but as an autonomous, complete, and primary state.
The loop thus closes: language and matter share the same instability. If nature admits a textual reading, writing can be addressed as a theory of measurement. The object we imagine behind, or within, a sign is approached only through further signs — verbal, mathematical, visual, physical, computational — yet none of these coincides with it. Each reconstructs, displaces, or models only a part of it.
What follows is therefore always improper: we do not investigate objects through signs, but signs through other signs.
WHAT’S NEW
Alice Oswald and Federico Federici read from Oswald’s “Dart”, Poetry Foundation
Selected poems, visual works and archival materials featured on Lyrikline, edited by Haus für Poesie, Berlin
Stanze dei non risorti, «Le parole e le cose», Italo Testa editor, July 9
Stanze dei non risorti, with a note by Paolo Giovannetti, Adamàs series curated by Tommaso Di Dio, Vincenzo Frungillo, and Ivan Schiavone, La Vita Felice, Milano, ISBN 978-8893469845 [Italian] · buy: la vita felice • amazon • read: archive
Mouse Museum (stanzas for potential texts), LN, ISBN 979-8254716044 [English] · buy: amazon • visit