Pencils & ProFiles

By Josee Bienvenu

Take a roll of aluminum foil from the supermarket: it’s a cold metal object, it’s shiny and vulgar. It also has a matte and silky side, so malleable, it’s better to engrave than any plate, it’s a soft plate. Marco Maggi’s micro-embossed alterations, soft cuts in dry point on the surface of the foil, drive attention to every angle of the aluminum cylinder’s health. 

Take the title of a Broadway play from last season. It’s like a roll of kitchen foil from the supermarket. A word change alters the information profile: The Pencil Monologues.
Take Xerox paper from Staples and look at its profile: Legal Size and Letter Size paper. The same fact is told differently from the viewpoint of Win Duisenberg or Alan Greenspan, Gao Xingjian or Jiang Zemin. Information is always profiled. In Marco Maggi’s ProFiles, information is impossible to access: illegible drawings behind plexiglass, kafkaien archives. Books have two profiles: on the binding the name of the author and title appear, the opposite side shows the blank profile of any printed information, tectonic
plates of compressed news: the press.

Our world resembles a great library where books are yet to be bound: it does not show signals of edition or alphabetical order. There’s 100% of available memory on the hard disk of the 21st Century. In the last decade a technological mutation allowed us to include telecommunications as a sixth sense. The ability of being constantly close to what is far away transforms our relationship to objects, images, sounds, and people. Marco Maggi builds a communication protocol adequate for a shrunken planet. Screaming in a stadium and screaming into someone’s ear is different. Less hardware requires more software. A less metallic and noisy world deserves patience and intimate attention.

The Pencil Monologues is an unplugged video documenting the death of long distance.