This is certainly not the right place to delve into such personal and tricky issues as the birth rate. Rather, it’s a passing thought brought to mind by the event “Languages, techniques and pathways of contemporary graphics” that you can visit for the whole of August in the event space “Caitta”, in Via del Teatro 8. You can admire some stunning examples of wood engraving, incision, lithography and silk-screen processing and many other techniques based on matrix reproduction.

Too often we tend to prize objects that are unique and unrepeatable, ‘one-of-a-kind’, and overlook the fascination of things that appear to everyone in the same way, which can be reproduced endlessly, leading us back over the same cognitive paths in a circular manner. But in precisely that moment we experience a mysterious phenomenon: the identical things always return slightly different and change us a fraction at a time.

Andy Warhol saw it this way: “I love images worth repeating, project them upon the ceiling. Multiply them with silk screening. See them with a different feeling. I love multiplicity of screenings. Things born anew display new meanings. I think images are worth repeating and repeating and repeating” (Lou Reed, “Images”).

Things born anew: it’s comforting to think that there are things like that, isn’t it? Even better than the most unrepeatable of masterpieces and the anxiety instilled in us by the idea that from one moment to the next, for the stupidest of reasons, it might be lost forever.

In the photo: the sculptor Floriano Bodini