Excerpt from Gagarin, Third Edition (www.gagarin.be).

Giuseppe Penone is featured in Edition: Refresh!

Light creates space.
Darkness is richly filled volume.
Light is empty space.
Colour is the meeting between the dark dust of the earth and
the light from the gold of the sun.
Their collision produces indigo if dust dominates, red if light
wins, green if light and dust are in balance.
They are the colours of the forest.
There is a moment in which the trees and the colour of the
forest are at the centre of man’s culture.
It is the moment in which man’s religious beliefs merge into
the things which surround them, the moment in which man
starts to think, to calculate time and to write about it with
the names of trees which harmonises with their vegetative
cycle. Through observation of the forest we sense the rules
for calculating and understanding the passage of life, to
articulate the timing of things.
It is the moment which witnessed the gods of the seasons
engrain themselves in the trees.
The names of the divinities thus contained in the wood of the
trees?
An alphabet of trees?
The writing of forest letters?
It is tempting to think that the sound of a word or of a name
is transcribed with forest letters.
How sacrilegious the Phoenicians were.
It was they who destroyed the sacredness of writing, who
corrupted poetry with the prose of writing enslaved to money.