EVENT #9

A lecture on things untold: omissions, reductions, abbreviations, contractions, erasures, abridgments, cuts, lacunae of various natures and scopes. Not a discussion of linguistics or or neurosciences – although this realm of knowledge arose from the investigation of deficits – but of fiction, a “literature of the gap”: thus far, no-one had ever done this. From Homer to Primo Levi, from Dante to Virginia Woolf, fiction is not only made up of words and affirmations but also of silences – and these silences speak. The gap, the lacuna, just because it is characterized by an omission, leads the reader to presuppose the existence of what does not appear, and therefore to lend verbal invention the status of truth. Thus the lacuna generates an esthetic experience in which the trauma of subtraction is compensated for by the more or less conscious ritual of integration and restoration (duration: approx. 120’).