Scene di conversazione, 1982-83

Four music stands turned in different directions (one of them is lying on the ground) and a stool mark the vertices of the area occupied on the ground by seventeen blank sheets and black and white photographs (some of them upside down), scattered about at random. On the music stands are other photographs held down by a glass sheet; the fragments of the fourth sheet are scattered on the ground, in analogy with the fallen music stand.
The work harkens back to the theme of the performance with the same title presented in Tokyo on 17 and 18 October 1982 as part of the group exhibition Thoughts and Actions (GPO-0469). Four male figures in ceremonial attire, located in the four median points of the diagonals of the room, were each correlated with a music stand and a progressive number of photographs that each time reproduced by juxtaposition the following figures. The description of the scene for the four situations defined, according to the principle of permutation, the position of the characters (seated, standing, or lying on the ground), as well as the number and location of the photographs with respect to the actors. This led, in the 1983 work, to the presence of the music stands and the photographs (the same as the ones used in Tokyo), integrated with the manuscript of the description of the scene, set down on the ground, touching the upside-down music stand.
The title was conceived in 1979-80, with a work that developed in three distinct phases, in which the protagonists are two male figures drawn on the wall, turned to face each other and intent on looking at or presenting a painting, associated with some canvases and a music stand, on which the drawing of a hand alludes to a third figure (GPO-0423).