96 In 1952, John Cage wrote 4'33", composition in three movements for any musical instrument; the score instructed the performer not to play for the whole duration of the pièce, lasting 4 minutes and 33 seconds. In the apparent surrounding silence, the importance given to the sound shifted from the musicians to the spectators, to their breaths, to the natural musicality produced by each space we take possession of, while the duration of the composition recalls the absolute zero: indeed, 4'33’’ correspond to 273 seconds, and the absolute zero is positioned at -273.15° C, temperature physically unattainable. Just like unattainable is the absolute silence. In 1958, Yves Klein eliminated the whole furniture from the Parisian gallery Iris Clert, painting in white colour its walls for his exhibition, entitled Le vide (trans. The void). As they passed through The Void, each of those present was served a drink of the same shade of Klein Blue for which the artist is universally known. The following day, all the guests who had experienced what appeared to be the total absence of colour, proper to the void, urinated blue. In 1969, at the historical Roman gallery L'Attico, Gino De Dominicis did nothing but trace with a white chalk the perimeter of a square, naming it Invisible Cube: none of those present at the exhibition dared to go inside that perimeter, and when the artwork was sold (because, yes, it was also sold), De Dominicis advised the collector, who did it without blinking an eye, to rent a truck for the transport of what was materially nothing but a piece of paper with the authentication of a non-existent artwork. Between 1984 and 1989, Alberto Burri’s Grande Cretto is one of the largest land-art works in the world, site-specific realized in the place where the old city of Gibellina, Sicily, stood, completely razed to the ground in 1968 by Belice earthquake. «I almost felt like crying, and the idea immediately came to me: here, I feel that I could do something. We can compact the rubble, arm it, and by means of the cement we can build an immense white crust, so that a perennial memory of this event could remain», Burri said in this regard, in the monograph dedicated to him by Stefano Zorzi. On an area of 80,000 square meters Burri cemented, making it eternal and eternally visible, the historical memory of a devastated land, tracing the free access for the appreciation of the work on the same access routes present in Gibellina before its destruction. The Grande Cretto, a shroud lying on the scar of the Belice Valley, was strongly desired by the unforgettable Patron of the Orestiadi Foundation, Ludovico Corrao, able to hear in a dazed silence art as a form of redemption. Paradox of art: making the invisible visible, keeping it in mind by raising it to work of art, as for the aforementioned art actions, chosen among a thousand because fully gone down in the history. Even the images collected in this diary are nothing more than a very limited florilegium of iconographic, and iconoclash, incarnations of the words transcribed in yesterday's list, free and invisible artworks, because nothing more than contemporary art – neither the social field, too often nor the moral field – took charge of invisibility as a terrain vague to be redeemed, in order to finally return to being human. Images hybridized by a hashtag declaring their specific form of invisibility, as if that word that marks them was the specific power of the superhero to which it refers; after all, invisibility is the most classic of superpowers, as an icon is the most classic of superheroes. Images that are nothing but incomplete notes of a history, that of contemporary culture, heartily and constantly engaged in giving shape to invisibility, in showing it, in order to allow it to tell everything it can and must tell; a wealth of meaning so touching that it can be felt on the skin, like a shiver, at the very thought of its passage. Each of these images is also political before than artistic, because everything able to project a universe of values is first of all political. In an era of synthetic identities and screaming super-egos, I find in redemption the highest form of art, as I find in redemption of the invisible the highest form of humanity. day 5 Making the invisible visible, a case history: invisibility of the object
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