Inventory of Memorable Human Objects

What remains of man when man is no longer there? His solutions remain.

This work is a _regesto_, in the most ancient sense of the word: an inventory, a reasoned list of what is worthy of being remembered. But here, no illustrious deeds are recorded. Instead, we record humble objects: a fragment of a gear, four railway nails, a hanger bent by hand, an eyelet press stamped with the name of a city - PADOVA - a black Bakelite insulator, a hoe that, once separated from its handle, becomes a mask.

These are objects the photographer has collected and then set free. Freed from workshop dust, from the junk dealer's pile, from their function. Placed on a glass sheet suspended in a grey void, lit by a neutral, compassionate light, they cease to be tools and become _symbols_.

Each object is an intelligent answer to a difficulty. Ingenuity does not lie in the exceptional, but in the everyday: how to hold two pieces of wood together, how to insulate a wire, to hang a coat with a single piece of wire. It is a humble, anonymous ingenuity that never sought aesthetics and yet produces it. Rust, wear, the patina of time are not decay: they are the biography of the object.

Other objects, however, resist. We no longer understand what they were for - that metal cylinder with two loop handles, that electrical box with its cloth-covered wires. Their mystery is precious. They remind us that not everything needs to be understood to be memorable. Enigma is a form of memory.

To photograph these objects as metaphysical still lifes means restoring dignity to what has been discarded. It is an act of archaeology of the present, but without nostalgia. The photographer does not celebrate the past: he isolates in the present the forms in which human intelligence has become matter.

And so, in the absence of man, it is man himself that we see more clearly.