"Catalogo"

wood, telephone books

The artist is interested in the subject of information and the storage of memory. For him, telephone books are memory objects - quote: "memory objects, in which man hides himself from forgetting".
The telephone book, consisting of many pages with alphabetically arranged names and telephone numbers, symbolises both networking and isolation. Theoretically, any of these names - or the people behind them - could connect and communicate with any other name. Many different telephone directories placed next to each other result in an almost infinite number of networking possibilities. However, measured against the theoretical-mathematical possibilities, in reality only an infinitesimal number of these possibilities are used. Start reading any telephone book from scratch: it will probably take quite a long time before the first name of a person you know appears. And as you read over thousands, hundreds of thousands of names, "anonymous names", you can make guesses as to how many of them have already died since going to press, which numbers have become invalid, etc.
Suddenly it becomes clear: we, as the whole of humanity, have virtually nothing to do with each other. Despite networking, despite the communication society. This is both disturbing and comforting.
(Gerhard Pilgram at the opening of the exhibition in Klagenfurt University Library, 1998)