A note on lists.

Text by Dylan Colussi.



A catalogue is, by definition, a complete enumeration of items rigorously arranged. It is a list, where elements follow each other to complement a certain pleasure towards incessant accumulation.

Lists are, rather than about what they include, about what they miss or might be added, or what they forget. There is never such a list which is complete or concluded. They count as much as imagination can fill, and contain much more than it is able to be conceived. As discourses, they have a beginning, at time as insignificant as the number of their components, but never an end in sight. They are a process which endows infinity in their implied “et cetera”.

Lists can be composed in words or images. In the paintings of Giovanni Pannini, one could enumerate the infinite display of works - paintings and sculptures, sights and debris of the eternal city - lined against the walls or piled up on the floor. The rooms of the galleries depicted by Pannini always hint at what is not visibile behind the wall and what can be found once one has taken a turn, when the curtain is moved, the half-closed boxes are opened. They are not different from a computer’s desktop, where icons of files and folders line up and at times even overlay each other. They are objects and virtual reproductions of objects, available for continuous rearrangement. In the endless pleasure of accumulation, an exhibition can be list too, or a list of lists at the same time. These paintings exhibited as a list do not imply much more than the order they are part of, and always recall what is not there, and what might be and what is going to be added.

But the pleasure of the list relies on the recombination of its elements. Open to possibility, they constantly cut and disassemble, blend and reassemble, moving their items from one end to the other, without losing their meaning. They are a form of un-knowledge, capable to erode of the syntax of the world, as Italo Calvino would say.

Creases and disturbance in the order of the archive, they suppose possible semantics to which they never set an end. In lists, everything can become anything, or something else.