MARCELLO MALOBERTI, METRONOTTE

A single word - misspelled, by a child with still-uncertain handwriting: “DIO”.

At the center of the nave, lying on the floor, almost as if fallen. Not engraved, not carved, not proclaimed, but traced in light. A light as uncertain as the alphabet that composes it. Blue neon, natural gas. The transparency of the tube hides nothing: the mechanism is exposed, fragile, mechanical. The word lights up as long as the battery lasts, then goes out.

It’s not hard to read in this scene an allegory of the divine apparition as a precarious event - that Conversion of Saint Paul so dear to Marcello Maloberti. But it might be more accurate to speak of a short circuit between the sacred and technology, between the infantile and the industrial, between spirituality and consumption. Battery-powered DIO is all there, suspended between irony and melancholy.

Maloberti does not build an icon; rather, he organizes a threshold. A threshold between what demands silence and what requires maintenance. The performance - lasting only one night - doesn’t serve to emphasize the ephemeral nature of the work, but to ascribe it in time as a condition: not the “unrepeatable event” of so much cheap cultural production, but an exercise in duration and concentration.

And then there are the night guards, in uniform, with their cars. No theatrical gestures. No comments. They’re there to watch over it, but they do not look. Custodians? Sentinels? Functional figures. More than actors, they are indices of value.

Their presence introduces an intellectual stance toward the work: the regulated and functional body of someone trained to surveil, observe, and only rarely to intervene. It’s about watching over something that is being consumed. About ensuring the safety of a light that isn’t eternal, of a kind of divine - entirely twentieth-century - that doesn’t even aspire to be eternal.

In this triangulation - word, light, surveillance - the intervention is condensed. There is no symbolism, but there is grammar. No spiritualism, but a pause at the threshold between what is believed and what is seen. The fact that the neon replicates a child’s hesitant line doesn’t not merely introduce an emotional register; it activates new semantic force: it is the untrained gesture that dares to name what, by definition, cannot be contained in writing (and indeed, in many cultures, is never written): the ineffable.

The device works as a paradox: sacredness is not produced by the context (a deconsecrated church), nor by the subject (the world “DIO”), but by the very fact that it must be continuously reactivated, refinanced, repaired.

It is within this logic - intermittent, unstable, watched over - that METRONOTTE finds its strength. Not in declaring, but in sustaining a condition: that of a search, and therefore an absence, which always demands a form. And which perhaps, for a moment, manages to shine.

Text by Giulio Dalvit