«Limpidamente alla cieca». Su due occasioni fototestuali di Giorgio Vasta

Within Giorgio Vasta's secondary production, there are two little-known phototextual works that offer a unique analytical opportunity: Mio padre e mia madre sono un bagliore (“My Father and My Mother Are a Glow”, 2012) and Storia fantasticata di una foto (“Phantasized Story of a Photo”, 2019). These are the only two instances in which Vasta encounters photographs with the aim of discussing them by establishing an explicitly ekphrastic relationship. What attracts the writer's attention and triggers his alienating writing are, in both cases, what we might call, with Clement Chéroux, photographic errors. Reflections, glare, and underexposure constitute the punctum around which Vasta's writing revolves, suggesting a close link between conditions of visibility and conditions of sayability, between visual and narrative wandering. This paper therefore aims to assume these two texts as privileged specula through which to observe Vasta's gaze at work and reflect on the generative processes of his writing, proposing to add a further piece to the phototextual work of a key author of the extreme contemporary.