STILLS

Dibond prints

Daylight filters in, casting the shadow of the Ethiopian amba on the walls, as if in a camera obscura; the door is open on a black void. The speculative character of The Silent Ray carries over to the pair of monochrome images that are the subject of two large prints that conclude the work.

The prints emphasize the sculptural qualities of the reconstructed stage model and its stillness. The image of the crypt hinted at in the other pieces returns, and with it the parallel between the colonial veteran and the figure of Lazarus. It is not the Lazarus from the Gospel of John, but rather his modern literary incarnation, as the man who caught a glimpse of the other side and is afterwards unable, or unwilling, to speak about what he has seen. Ennio Flaiano too, in his Tempo di Uccidere (1947), the haunting novel on his own experience of the colonial war, conjures the figure Lazarus as a way to frame a last, destabilizing moral question.