Already a protagonist in Cremona in 2019 with The End, an installation on the Po river, Martinotti presents the Encyclopédie de l’Architecture Nouvelle, a video installation that takes its title from a 1942 book on one of the most influential architectural currents of the twentieth century, the Rationalism. The pages of the volume, photographed by the artist and rendered in film, flow between two hands of which only the shadow can be seen. Moving horizons, fragments of spaces and places, empty architectures as possible scenographies of an unresolved time flow, making the fragile and ephemeral character that every historical memory preserves tangible to the eye. Photographic frames like friezes ready to vanish thus reveal themselves as malleable architectural material: buildings and historical monuments pass through the repeated performative action of spectral hands which become their projection tool. The suspended gestures that characterize Martinotti’s performances are an attempt to transcribe the past into the present, but which is immediately destined to disappear, testifying to the fleeting nature that every desire for memory and historical representation preserves. The bodily and performative dimension therefore becomes manifest of a forgotten, of a silence of memory.
