Poetics of corruption, in Sara Marini, Alberto Bertagna (eds.) Memorabilia. Nel paese delle ultime cose. Roma: Aracne Editrice, 2015

The notion of corruption is often interpreted in a moralistic sense as synonymous with moral decay. However, corruption can also be understood as a reaction to a pre-existing status, a deliberate or necessary alteration of a pure original form, aimed at preventing it from being mortified and confined to a museum, or transformed into a hibernated body. Recycling operations attribute multiple identities to a work, by welcoming rewriting processes on pre-existing works, in the context of a project in which the city is seen as an archeological text as well as a palimpsest that can still be transformed. Yet, these life-extending operations come at a price, as they generate surrogate. Some recycling operations indeed unveil some kind of autophagy, which becomes manifest in the will to violently modify the heritage of the city by rebuilding it continuously, in a game in which a collective work of art is altered and manipulated by different authors.