"Black Blocs is an ongoing project on iconoclasm. The Blocs are a series of black objects which might (or might not) be models of archetypal spaces.
Each Bloc is conceived as the response to a tale without place and time. Folk tales are always based on formal archetypes that repeat over and over, always the same, yet always different. Much in the same way the Blocs embody basic spatial organizations that are recognizable, in various declensions, in our cities past and present. The Blocs are intentionally impossible to reproduce. Any three- dimensional object always resists a full translation into a picture, as there will always be something that remains hidden, but a black object is even harder to capture in a photo. The intention behind the Blocs is to rethink form beyond figure. Form and figure are not the same thing, form is not just a visual thing. Indeed, pictures consume form, its depth, feel, and movement always slowly erode. Yet again, pictures and images are not the same thing: iconoclasm is meant to challenge pictures so that images can be thought anew. When images cannot become pictures, when form cannot become figure, in times of iconoclasm, words have to absorb all the social duties of visual representation. Indeed, perhaps man discovered form in the rhythm of chanting and poetry, before than in painting and sculpture.
The project therefore comprises the black objects, and their corresponding tales. Trying to find form in words and in irreproducible black objects means to challenge ourselves to reject our visual culture, a culture which relies so heavily on figures and pictures. Can words and objects trigger new images out of old tales? Can we recognize form in something that cannot be seen? Wars against the figure are cyclically waged in art, politics, and religion. They are always predicated on a paradox: that of the return to a tabula rasa intended as a fresh departure. In celebrating a supposed original blankness, iconoclasm is a form of nostalgia, perhaps the only honest form of nostalgia we can imagine. In fact, if nostalgia is the ache to return, it should be evident that you can never go home again, since man is by nature a rootless creature with no specific habitat. As return is impossible, nostalgia pushes us further afield instead of drawing us back. When the obsessive cataloguing of picture from the past is forbidden, nostalgia becomes nothing but the recognition that what lies ahead is still unchartered." (Maria Giudici)
