“The invented image has its own truth”
Giordano Bruno, A general account of bonding, 1591.
Manifesting themselves in different times and places, artefacts are marked by their trajectory1. Their irregular movements, comprised of disappearances, emersions and relocations, diverge profoundly from the linear and orderly movements of historiography, practice entrusted with the challenging task of fabricating a coherent narrative of the past, unraveling the skein of history through the interpretation of material fragments. In absolute terms, the dream of an all-encompassing historiography would be the dream of a fool, as the relationship between history and historiography is analogous to the relationship between an event and its memory: in both cases, what is selected for memorialization is fundamentally built on exclusion and forgetfulness.
The irreconcilability of the expanded, circular time of history (which contains everything simultaneously) with the partitioned time of historiography (which collects and inserts fragments in the container of the historical discourse) materializes a disturbing truth: the inevitable partiality of historic knowledge. Adopting the aesthetic traditions employed in the documentation of archeological findings and museum objects — which legitimate the mechanical apparatus of the camera as a mean to convey an objective, unmediated truth — Parlato builds deceitful images of inexistent archeological relics, placed between “the crystallizing movement of the document (as a symptom of the object, emanated from the real) and that, more erratic and centrifugal, of the disparate (as a symptom of the gaze, emanated from the imaginary)”2.
The Fantastic emanated by Parlato’s images is not a ‘declared Fantastic’, which aims to illustrate a totally unusual universe, but an ‘insidious Fantastic’ of subtle ambiguity, which cracks the surface of a predetermined regularity that appeared imperturbable3: that of the historic discourse. This space, consisting of endless similarities4, transports the viewer in the domain of dreams, in which “we seek the original model, we would like to be sent back to a starting point, an initial revelation, but there is none: the dream is the similar that eternally refers to what is similar”5. Wearing the vest of the archeologist, the observer finds themself attempting to interpret the images as if they were relics and, running into the impossibility of finding a precise and categorical narrative, to weave a network of fictitious associations between them.
Arming herself with the tools of uncertainty Parlato cuts the surface of the historical discourse, forcing it to reveal the gaps on which it is built. It is precisely this space, the space of omissions, that allows the emersion of multiple coexisting narratives: what was previously a single narrating voice opens up to the inclusion of multiple voices, linear time is transfigured into circular time. The imaginary created by Parlato places before us the enigma of the similar and simultaneous , a theme loved by Georges Didi-Huberman, whose common root, simul , “expresses a kind of rivalry of fate”6 — the intervention of chance that acts on the fortuitous encounters with re-emerged artefacts and on the arbitrary selection that legitimizes objects within the sphere of academic discourse and places them within their institutional framework. By adopting an indirect language that superimposes reality and fiction, Parlato plays a trick on the invisible7 and succeeds in “making less obscure that which by nature escapes language and representation”8: the irreducible extraneousness of the past.
1 Willumson, Glenn (2004) Making Meaning: displaced materiality in the library and art museum, Photographs Objects Histories: On the materiality of images ed. by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, London: Routledge, pp.62
2 Didi-Huberman, Georges (1998) Apparente, Disparato , La Conoscenza Accidentale, Bollati Boringhieri editore: Torino 2011, pp.13, translated by the author
3 Caillois, Roger, (1965) At the heart of the fantastic , Abscondita srl: Milano 2004
4 Didi-Huberman, Georges (1998) Il sangue della merlettaia , La Conoscenza Accidentale, Bollati Boringhieri editore: Torino 2011, pp.74
5 Blanchot, Maurice (1955), Lo spazio letterario , Einaudi: Torino 1967, pp.235, translated by the author
6 Didi-Huberman, Georges (1998) Simile e Simultaneo , La Conoscenza Accidentale, Bollati Boringhieri editore: Torino 2011, pp.25, translated by the author
7 Caillois, Roger, (1965) At the heart of the fantastic, Abscondita srl: Milano 2004, pp.165
8 Ibid.