Declaration of poetics by Achille Pace 1960
The thread not only represents the objective reality, but it is also loaded of symbolic meanings.
It indicates logical discourse, measurement, uncertainty, stability, construction, relationship, relation, communication, life and death. It can express the plane, the concave, the convex, slowness, tension, space. It can be rational or irrational, static or dynamic movement, growth, end. The thread follows moment by moment our life and testifies, with its itinerary, to the dangers, frailty, rigour, strength, thinking in all its manifestations. The thread as an object is therefore outside us, but also has within us, in our subconscious, deep roots that in the end make us what we are.
We cannot deny living today a particularly uncertain historical moment.
Peace, freedom and our own life are uncertain, the future even more. Becoming aware of it does not mean adapting to it, but find the strength for free choices, necessary to oppose the dangers that threaten us.
I chose the thread as a significant element of my work towards the end of 1959. It was the time of the Informal. My interest was then to come out of its irrational tangle. The thread detached from it slowly at first, then more and more decisively. It arranged and dissolved from the objective and alienated gesture of the Informal. As matter, my thread maintains the same state of falling, of vague existence and indeterminacy as the Informal, but at the same time it aspires to a more conscious, less alienated, more logical and constructive existence: of course, within the limits of a reality that is still untransformed and full of contradictions, lacerations and mystifications. The thread is also loaded with the future that the conscious man tries to prepare today. My thread is one of the approaches to this possible future, because it considers the reality of this historical moment, characterised by the condition of work in general and the condition of people in particular. The individual, by becoming aware of the reasons for his choices and his work, becomes part of the processes of culture as a process of work and becomes, at the same time, a creator of a new culture. When art is such, it can make a valid contribution by indicating operational methods and moral choices.