I mangiatori di patate is a theatre of descent—a catabasis into the clangor of a catastrophe that concerns us all. It reverberates through the volumes of the Lazzaretto Vecchio in Venice, whose long wings still bear the memory of quarantine and disease. Clatters, hums, and pulsations emerge as echoes of events already lived or foreseen: they are there to alert time itself.

In radical darkness, the vortex of a typhonic force reminds us that history cannot turn its back on its own ruins. A compact cluster of figures—at the frontier of the most remote kind of presence—emerges from a deep night. They share something with the miners and oilers of the Borinage, whom Van Gogh portrayed with extreme devotion. They carry on their skin the marks of a defenseless obscurity of which they are the sensible extension. Descent and emergence from the abyssal well converge, and it is there that a prodigious discovery unfolds: the opaque pearl of language. And it is at that moment that violence reveals itself, demanding to speak on its behalf—it speaks instead of you.

Clothed in authority, discourse emerges from a parasitic mouth. Under the sign of compulsion, it argues without content. Less important is what it says than the fact its act of speaking to you. Blows of repetition and repetitions of blows strike the face until it disappears. Lip plates stenograph the event of language as a passivity that starves whoever must sustain it. Outside habitual grooves, this speech reveals itself to be saturated with obsessions, xenoglossia, and convulsions—products of the painful split of dissociation. And an organ without a body is left to swing from the raised arm of the final judgment, which allows no appeal.

Piersandra Di Matteo