Es decir, el propósito de abolir el pasado ya ocurrió en el pasado y—paradójicamente— es una de las pruebas de que el pasado no se puede abolir.

Jorge Luis Borges, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nuevas inquisiciones, 1952

Saturday, November 3, 2018, at 6:00 pm, Quartz Studio is pleased to present Der Zauberberg, the first solo show in Turin of the South American artist Jorge Macchi (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1963). The title comes from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, which left a deep impression on Macchi when he read it years ago. The artist says that, after reading it, he learned that the magic mountain is a traditional image in German literature, a place where people disappear, somewhere you don’t come back from. Castorp, the novel’s protagonist, goes to visit a relative in a sanatorium in the mountains for three weeks, but he ends up staying there for seven years. Der Zauberberg is a site-specific installation that Jorge Macchi conceived specifically for Quartz Studio. Macchi explains, “Based on the pattern of the floor, I selected 14 zones that have exactly the same distribution of black, red and yellow tiles. In eight of these zones, and on the same spot in each one of them, I built identical structures made with objects and rubbish apparently gathered by chance (cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, glass bottles, broken glass panes, MDF boards, newspapers, matches, papers, pieces of clothing, etc). The objects are the same in the eight groups, and they also are installed in the same way, repeating the random distribution. The floor of the room with its hexagonal pattern becomes part of the repetition: the relation between the objects and the pattern is always the same in the eight zones although there are no precise boundaries on the floor. It’s the presence of the identical groups of objects that transforms the continuity of the floor into a series of reflected units. The white walls and the black border on the floor set a boundary for a section of an infinite repetition. Two identical newspaper pages hang from the wall very close to the entrance door. All the texts and photographs are cut out except the word ‘GESCHICHTE’ (history in German).” Macchi continues, “There are two previous works linked to this project: Parallel Lives (two versions), 1998. In one version, two sheets of glass broken in the same way lay next to each other on the floor. The second version is a matchbox with a division down the middle. The distribution of matches is exactly the same on each side. In both versions of Parallel Lives, a highly improbable situation is shown to the viewer: the repetition of chance.”