Can a place without a past even exist?

At the center of the installation are two knitted wool blankets. Each carries an abstracted, low-resolution image of Fontana’s pilastro, derived from a screenshot of its listing on Christie’s website, proof of sale. The image loses clarity and gains softness through the translation into textile, echoing the way memories blur over time, become something warm, soft and malleable. What remains is imprecise, liquid, difficult to grasp, only legible from a distance. The blankets do not depict the artwork faithfully, but hold its absence, allowing forgetting and distortion to become part of the image itself.

One blanket is displayed in the exhibition space, while its counterpart lies on a bed in room 320 at the Falkensteiner Hotel, where once the  Hotel Alpi stood. The pilastro returned home, in a different strand of time. The blanket in the Hotel is continuously live-streamed into the exhibition space and opens a portal, a real-time connection between two locations and temporalities: the past and present-day hotel and the exhibition space. It creates a passage between physical site and disembodied presence, where the work exists simultaneously here and elsewhere, in reality and memory, anchored to a place it can no longer physically inhabit while coming alive in the visitors experience.

Even when places appear unchanged, they are saturated with layers of what has happened there. And when a site is altered or erased, these memories do not disappear. They persist as felt absences, shaping how people relate to what replaces it. On the second blanket blanket rests a publication holding found material from the pilastro and the Hotel Alpi’s past, photographs, booklets, texts, news articles and personal stories appear to hover above the ground. Refraining from offering a complete historical narrative, the installation inserts loose fragments into the visitor’s present experience. It operates as a palimpsest, allowing the site to be continuously written and rewritten, not through monumentality, but intimacy, fragility, and layers.