The Banquet in Honour of the Princess of Saxony, completed between 1772 and 1773 by the Tyrolean painter Ignaz Unterberger, is one of the rare surviving records of the many celebrated receptions hosted by the Borghese family at the Loggia dei Vini. The scene, seen from above, emphasizes the theatricality of the celebration. The numerous guests crowd in circles beneath the pavilion around the table, and around the Loggia; some observe the scene from above, seated along the parapet. There is something in this view that recalls the horseshoe-shaped structure of Italian-style theatres which, in the eighteenth century, had spread rapidly. «Ways of seeing», as John Berger would say?
“Let’s make LAVINIA a Walk,” we wrote at the beginning of this story. And over time we have imagined different possibilities, physical and metaphorical, for a walk. LAVINIA is, among other things, a walk through history and through its manifestations in the city of Rome. If one walks for ten minutes, following Via Po, Via Basento is easily reached. Hidden in a clandestine printing press at number 55, on November 20, 1943, Leone Ginzburg, writer and anti-Fascist, was arrested while organizing the Roman Resistance. During his confinement in Pizzoli, in Abruzzo, he had completed the memorable revision of the Italian translation of War and Peace: “War is the historical world, peace the human world” he had written—perhaps optimistically—in the introduction to the Einaudi edition.
Carlo Ginzburg, son of Leone and Natalia Levi (who became a celebrated writer as Ginzburg), has been one of the most important historians of the post-war period. Among the founders of microhistory, he developed the so-called “evidential paradigm.” In a famous essay he reconstructs a method based on the analysis of “infinitesimal details, outwardly insignificant clues” and, even, the residues of official documents to decode a collective mentality or an entire culture: Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method. Among other things, he brings together three figures trained as doctors: the art historian Giovanni Morelli (to whom we owe the so-called “Morellian method” for the attribution of paintings), the creator of the detective Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the future inventor of psychoanalysis. “In all three cases, perhaps infinitesimal traces make it possible to grasp a deeper reality, otherwise unattainable. Traces: more precisely, symptoms (in Freud’s case), clues (in Sherlock Holmes’s), pictorial marks (in Morelli’s).”
But the evidential method is older than modern science, Ginzburg warns: “For thousands of years mankind lived by hunting. In the course of endless pursuits hunters learned to construct the appearance and movements of an unseen quarry through its tracks: prints in soft ground, snapped twigs, droppings, snagged hairs or feathers, smells, puddles, threads of saliva. They learnt to sniff, to observe, to give meaning and context to the slightest trace. They learnt to make complex calculations in an instant, in shadowy wood or treacherous clearing.”
For the historian, it is a matter of finding the most philologically reliable paths through which to reconstruct a history different from the grand narratives imposed by the “victors.” A gilded silver cup, then, or the record of an Inquisition interrogation of a “heretic,” become traces through which the darker aspects of history emerge, the narration of the lives and thoughts of those whom power deprived of a voice, sanitizing events and even memory. “An object that speaks of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. It does not speak of itself. It speaks of others. Will it include them too?”
Peter Friedl
Last Jest
“I now see distinctly,” he said, “what manner of people these maskers are. They are a great king and his seven privy-councillors—a king who does not scruple to strike a defenceless girl, and his seven councillors who abet him in the outrage. As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester—and this is my last jest.”
Edgar Allan Poe, Hop-Frog, 1849.
Peter Friedl considers himself a failed artist. He began making drawings more than sixty years ago and has continued to make them every day since. He lives in exile.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Report 1964–2022, KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2022); Teatro, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, and Carré d’Art - Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes (2019); Teatro Popular, Lumiar Cité, Lisbon (2017); The Diaries, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2016); The Dramatist, Artspace, Auckland (2014); Peter Friedl, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2010); Working, Kunsthalle Basel (2008); Blow Job, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp (2008); Work 1964–2006, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Miami Art Central and Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille (2006–2007); and OUT OF THE SHADOWS, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2004). Friedl’s work has also been exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; MoMA PS1, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. He has participated in documenta 10, 12 and 14 (1997, 2007, 2017); Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019); 1st Anren Biennale (2017); Taipei Biennial (2012, 2016); 48th and 56th Venice Biennale (1999, 2015); 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014); La Triennale, Paris (2012); 28th Bienal de São Paulo (2008); Manifesta 7, Trento (2008); 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008) and 3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2004).
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder, Gianni Politi
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding,
Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder,
Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding,
Enzo Cucchi, Ruth Ewan, Piero Golia,
Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still visible: Ross Birrell & David Harding,
Enzo Cucchi, Ruth Ewan, Piero Golia,
Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska