Susan Wise
Parusia
 
in “Maurizio Pellegrin: Reflections and Intentions”
Venice, Arsenale Editrice, 1999
 

The dark-eyed child was not talkative. She never parted with her bag, made of some precious fabric, perhaps an old Venetian brocade, now worn and faded and even frayed. It was filled with things, whatnots, knick-knacks, objects found by chance
or encountered by necessity. A miniature painted china house, tiny farm animals, pieces of bark, exquisite, fragile, spider web-like leaves, fragments of stones, smooth pebbles, a small silver spoon, shiny acorns, bit of bright, broken jewellery, objects, toys, brought together. A collection of the dissimilar, of coincidences, entirely detached from their singular meaning. Whenever there was a pause in time, a place in space, she would sit herself down, resting the bag by her side. And bit by bit, piece by piece, she would draw them from the bag and set them out in front of her. Soon extending to the right and the left, she arranged them, She put them in order. And when they were all out there, arrayed before her, she sat for a while in contemplation. And then she gathered them up slowly and returned them to their bag. She arranged, and then she undid, so as to create once again. What divinity presided this order? Or to what divinity was this arranging destined? Was the child-god playfully ordering chaos, creating the universe? When Maurizio spoke to me, fervently, of the Japanese tea ceremony he had attended in New York City, he described the most refined, the most demanding of rituals. To what end? The ritual itself might be the sacrality. Whatever is this arranging we are so busy with? Artists, poets, arranging colour-forms, volumes, word-sounds. And the arranging of objects, what is it aiming at? Installing for dismounting? Because if the arrangement were to remain, it would no longer live to be recreated, it would be mere form? And what about arranging in Venice, the mot arranged of cities? Just look at the facade of San Marco, those countless things set side by side, like the tessere of mosaics. But in Maurizio’s case, not to last. Only the photographs, installed in a book (another arrangement), are to endure as memory, as immateriality. So arranging might be ritual amidst impermanency (ironically defying impermanency?). Collections of found or sought-after objects, mementos perhaps, laden with desire or nostalgia, ordered by a passion of numbers, are arranged, in expectancy. Generating a perspective that is novel, thought rooted in the Quattrocento, they predispose, they await, they solicit, their opposite: a coming, a presence, one might say an epiphany, of the invisible, the unknown. Which is everything that – apparently! – they are not.