La disposizione della terra
in Nanni Valentini, exh. cat., Padiglione d’arte contemporanea, Milan, 19 January – 20 February 1984
Nanni Valentini does not make figures, because the figures come afterwards; he does not make a discourse, because the discourse is subsequent. All speak of that which is after, of that which is subsequent, hosted by the language that is by now spoken by itself. They are not authors, but the simple bearers of signs that language has already assigned at its birth.
It is this as-signation of signs that interests Nanni Valentini, so not language but its limit, which can be traced where what we know as distinct is united, not in the coherent form of Logos, but in that incongruous one of dia-logue.
Dia-logue is not a tranquil word, in fact it is not even a word, but a tension between words.
It contains that dia that we find in diameter as the union of maximally distant points. Unlike the exchange of words. The dia-logue is the intensification of the conflict, union of incongruities, dislocation of locations. The four capitals of Nanni Valentini are the opening right out (s-quadernarsi) of the four, not the squaring (quadratura) of the circle to which all our words tend.
They are junction and opposition, but also assimilation that gathers. The location that houses their dis-location is the history that has never proceeded by succession of events, but always by assimilated oppositions.
To as-similate oppositions means to see them in that hidden similarity by which the clay that imprisons is the same one that the desert frees, the tree that opens up from the seed is the same one that the seed encloses. Beyond the eye-catching oppositions on which our language feeds, there is their sub-terranean com-position. The earth, in fact, is that boundary on the other side of which lie those differences that on this side are indissoluble unity. This is why the earth is a symbol in the Greek sense of the word: sym-ballein means ‘to put together’.
The earth, beneath itself, constitutes that unity which, above itself, unfolds as difference. In this sense Nanni Valentini does not work with the signs that belong to discourse, but with the symbols that are at the boundary of discourse; he does not work with the earth, as only the superficiality of one who belongs to the civilisation of technology could say, but in the earth, to see what is composed when the earth gathers and what is de-composed when the earth lets go.
The respiration of the earth.
In this respiration, which has none of the peacefulness of sleep or dream, the thirteen fragments of the myth of Osiris can be described because they are different, abandoned by the indifference of the earth, like the vase of Florence abandoned by the octopus. They are the children of the distribution of the vase, of the wandering of the earth. But what will become of them when, after its wandering, the earth returns into itself?
In fact, when the earth goes off wandering, it reserves its right to return into itself. This is where the possibility of description ends, because the logos and its cosmos are succeeded by chaos, the yawn of the earth, which devours all the cosmologies and all the arrangements that people try to give to the things spread out on the earth.
The earth, in fact, has not only an above where the works (of art) are constructed, but it also has a below which is not exposition but disposition, in the strong sense of one who disposes of the being and non-being of all things. Nanni Valentini is interested in the disposition of the earth.