L’opera in palio, 1994

The work conceived and realized for Luciano Pistoi's initiative on the occasion of the 1994 Palio di Siena – the traditional horse race held on Piazza del Campo between the city's seventeen contrade – borrows two elements from the race itself: the actual Palio (the rectangle or fabric "rag" awarded to the winning contrada and then exhibited at the Palazzo Pubblico as a symbol of victory), and the coloured signs of the participating contrade.
Sixteen stainless steel pillars, some of which fallen, delimit an inaccessible square area, where, scattered all around and gradually becoming fewer as they move outwards, are seventeen canvases some of which seen from the recto, others from the verso. On the ones at the centre, a discontinuous rectangular line made in pencil is a life-size representation of the Palio, while all around it seventeen silk festoons – devoid of the heraldic symbols of the relative contrada banners, but identical in the chromatic proportion of the original ones – are randomly knotted together, in part tied to the pillars, recalling a large "palette". In this sense, the iconography inspired by the Palio puts up as a prize (like the Palio itself) the becoming of the work as such, in its unpredictable and unexpected flourishing upon our gaze.