“In Palazzo Luce and in this room that houses an entire library, it was impossible not to think about the shelves containing an innumerable amount of words. I couldn’t help but think about literature, which is a theme that often recurs in my searches through quotations,” says artist Marzia Migliora, describing her encounter with Palazzo Luce and, in particular, in one of the two libraries where she chose to create the site-specific intervention that would allow visitors to engage with the words “one on one.”
The phrases, taken from authors such as Sylvia Plath, Marisa Merz, Samuel Beckett, and José Saramago, are displayed on mirrored surfaces that appear to expand the space. They are written in descending characters and without spaces between words, thus resembling the letters used in optometric tests that determine visual acuity during an eye test. “If we manage to perform this strenuous reading exercise,” explains the artist, “we realize that each of these sentences deals with the themes of fear and blindness. Two things, that may on the face of it seem very different, but fear sometimes makes it impossible for us to see reality; it makes us perceive it through a filter, a lens that distorts it.”
The relationship between the darkness of blindness and the light of vision becomes an even more important symbol in the Palazzo’s spaces as they are traversed by powerful brightness: art can traverse darkness, cleave through it, and illuminate it like a shining weapon against any fear.
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