Noi e loro

… Gerz has disseminated more than eighty nameplates in the field. We immediately try to focus on who, for example, Wolfang Krostitz or Marco Jacopo Kauffmanin or Mara De Angelis could be. No matter how hard we try, they are names that fail to evoke anything in our memory. And it is natural, because in reality they are not characters connected to some historical episode or particular event, but names of people linked to the now, to the present day, of the inhabitants of Ostia.

Daniela Trincia 2011

… Gerz ha disseminato nel campo più di ottanta targhette riportanti dei nomi. Immediatamente si cerca di mettere a fuoco chi possa essere, ad esempio, Wolfang Krostitz o Marco Jacopo Kauffmanin o Mara De Angelis. Per quanto ci si possa sforzare, sono nomi che non riescono a evocare nulla nella nostra memoria. Ed è naturale, perché in realtà non sono personaggi connessi a qualche episodio storico o particolare evento, ma nomi di persone legate all’adesso, all’oggi, di abitanti ostiensi.

Daniela Trincia 2011

Noi e loro is an ambiguous title: it suggests a difference, a distance, even a hostility, as well as a common trait, something shared: the passage from antagonism to dialogue is, for Gerz, precisely the role of memory and the works dedicated to it. With a full awareness of history, it is necessary to transform yesterday’s foes into today’s friends, to work with the living to honour the dead. For these reasons, the field in Ostia is populated by living people … Thus, if the field separates the “us" of the synagogue from the “them" of the settlement in Ostia, Noi e loro inverts this meaning, bridging the gap and seeking dialogue and understanding. With a work that is not eternal like a monument, but temporary and reversible, like an encounter: the piece is an illegal guest, more like the medicinal herbs themselves, cultivated while awaiting the next phase of excavations. The work and nature contend the field: legible in January, when the grass has been freshly cut, the names are progressively absorbed by the grown grass and other spontaneous flowers.

Adachiara Zevi 2012

Here … appear the names of living beings that take possession of their remote history and that, like this, will be swallowed up by time, by vegetation, by the cycle of nature.

Quercioli Mincer 2021

Qui … appaiono i nomi di esseri viventi che riprendono possesso della lorostoria remota e che, come questa, verranno comunque fagocitati daltempo, dalla vegetazione, dal ciclo della natura.

Quercioli Mincer 2021