Pino Musi

Biology of the Act of Writing
Biologie de l'acte d'écrire
(2002)


eng · ita

This body of work stems from a collaboration with the Biblioteca Civica in Rovereto (IT) and the Fondation Martin Bodmer in Geneva (CH). Both collections not only hold original texts, manuscripts and extraordinary incunabula of major importance, but also documents whose writings are filled with the flow of daily existence (list of expenses, letters, etc.) A photographic interpretation that captures the physical and emotional interaction between the one who wrote and the one who reads, in a confrontation of signs and words, the book object.
related texts:Libro persona / Flaminio GualdoniHemp, Cannabis Sativa, Lady; jute, Corchorus Capsularis, Huangma; flax, Linum Perenne, Yama; ramie, Bohemeria Nivea, zhuma… According to tradition, Cai Lun invented paper in Luoyan, China, around 105 D.C. A Korean monk named Doncho brought it to Japan around 610 D.C. And approximately eleven centuries ago, Ibn Muqla codified a perfectly proportionate writing in six major styles that Yâqout, Mir ‘Ali, Soltân ‘Ali Machhadi, ‘Abd al-Djabbâr regarded as beautiful, and visionary. Among the various parchments are the scrolls of the Ilias Picta and the friars of the Book of Kells, and Konrad Forster, and the texture of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible. The whole other face of the book displayed before our eyes. Such is the meaning of the condensed, coagulated story told in his images by Pino Musi: a “biology of the act of writing” according to René de Solier, and the body of the page, the sign, which is primarily itself before it is other, and the vision. It is the gaze and the touch, touching with the eyes, relishing on gentle “bibliophagy”. Detecting first, by the scent, whether the binding is in Sagrinato, what Gaetano Volpi called the “dark scent of ingratitude”; he also told of “the grateful scent” of the “beautiful Greek text by Sophocles, in-octavo from Colineo printed in Paris in 1528”, and of “Saint Catherine of Siena’s letters, in-4 from Venice, dated 1562, and their suave fragrance.” This is the soul of the Borgesian Volumen, a prism with six rectangular faces composed of subtle layers of paper that probably figure a frontispiece, front leaf, epigraph in cursive, preface, again in cursive, nine or ten chapters beginning with a capital letter, summary, ex libris combining an hourglass with a Latin motto, concise corrigendum, a few bare pages, and a large inscription detailing typography, date and location where it was printed: objects that constitute “the Art of Writing”, as it has by now been acknowledged. What is considered rhetoric for the fools becomes poetry for others. It is primarily the book, body and images. It is a story, an identity, and a sense of belonging. Because, as Edmond Jabès claimed in, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of his Arm a Tiny Book, “we live of writing and die of erasure”. Otherwise an architecture photographer – but always a photographer of the sacred –, Musi works within the physiology of the book, of the page, precisely to prevent it from dying of erasure, and to restitute the atavist secret of the page that enables it, under any latitude, to become the Book. The book has grandeur and miseries, it is the meaning of life; and as Paul Valéry reminds us, as much as life does, it fears fire (the fire that burnt books in Alexandria and in Baghdad, in Ephesus and in Berlin) as much as humidity, beasts and time; but above all, it fears its proper content. After all, it is the closest equivalent to the human being, the beauty and the beast, splendor and dissolution, sensual plenitude and misery of loss. Musi condenses everything, the entire book person, in his images, which in turn become inscriptions of light, pages of another enlightened book that he traces in the physiology of his own images, in the density of carbon and the acute tension involved in their printing, before they finally turn tactile and fragrant, mental because physical. And following the perpetual cycle, everything becomes book again.

This is what it seemed to me / Antonello Scotti I intentionally listen to the sound of the page. Annotated in columns, units, decimals, hundreds, up to the thousands – numbers probably; I considered them as if they were a classical design. Now, they are likely to be a list… in columns, with precise, orderly calligraphy unfolding in sequence, stopping, and resuming; orderly yet never ordinary; the kind of non-ordinariness of the “script” that prompts reverie and leads me to change my gaze. Obviously, I need to boost my analytical system to be able to come up with a story, or better, an instinct that will help me connect one sign to the next in order to understand – a form of necessity that surges every time I am confronted to an image. I start from the last page, deliberately ignoring what precedes. Everything goes so fast and I do need to adjust; I need to adjust primarily to my own curiosity, revealing the end in order to know everything that lies in between. And here, another structure unfolds: the need to understand if the distance stems from the rushed, sharp handwriting, which no longer holds anything ordinate, but has not yet given anything away to the ordinary. I am shocked, needing to pause: I step back for a moment and grab a pencil before gazing again at the image; I sharpen the pencil and set it aside, still within my eyesight. Chance was offering an opportunity to the palimpsest of signs converted into vision through the process of light. The pencil, my pencil, could not compete with the power of the instrument forged by photography. Mobilizing the forces of imagination, I moved to the opposite shore. I remember falling asleep while strolling, and dreaming that I was pulling a ring out of my mouth, a ring engraved with the words, “affirmations - negations”. I kept it, spinning it around my finger, and then laid it on a white surface, or maybe it was black, I can’t remember. I woke up, put my head in my hands, and drifted away. This is at least what it seemed to me.

related book:
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