A lume spento (By the light of a switched-off lamp)

“In front of Mozart’s house in Salzburg, a lantern removed from the façade had left a large halo on the wall, by its absence, like the imprint of the light on the wall. There are stars that die while their light lives on and their agony remains visible to our eyes for millennia. I brought a switched-off lamp close to the face of a statue, and added a light with colour, a light that came from nowhere, a light from a dead star. I don’t mean that I thought up these things or that these things gave rise to a work. Quite the opposite, a work was born, and I thought these things afterwards.”

Claudio Parmiggiani