Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press | Rosanna Albertini’s The Kite
by Rosanna Albertini
Dis-like, dis-quiet, dis-member, dis-traction, D I S, the 3 (greek) letters that have lived hundreds years and found a place in many languages of today, give the words a strange uncertainty: DIS ARM for instance, it’s an arm and it is not. Fiona Banner decided it is the arm of a clock. Time is gently held inside the hand, it’s human time. As the arm moves around invisible hours the human touch replaces certainty. Time is not written. Movement, inner timing, the unpredictable, surprising clock in our body hosts an infinite shrinking, or enlarging time, the son of emotions. Silent and invisible. Not a hero.
We all are, including the artist, prisoners of languages that we love and dislike.
They are a constant challenge. Words are the most tricky. On paper they slip away fast. If we stop on them more than a few seconds each word becomes a deep hole, understanding goes to hell. Paul Valéry showed me that. But placed on the floor cast in industrial fonts — using melted aluminum that was once the wing of a jet attack aircraft originally used by the British Royal Air Force and the French Air Force — the surviving word, V U L V A, becomes heaviness, sculpted mixture of meanings; an object, an absurd object in our face.