Tobias Zielony
How To Make A Fire Without Smoke

7 MAR until 18 APR 2026
Opening – 7 MAR 2026, 12 pm

On the day I see Aldo Loris Rossi sitting in front of a map, in front of a map of his world, that is to say: of Naples —

On the day I contemplate the child in the image, and around the child the spheres, the globes and balls and orbs of empire, the spheres and chimeras, the child in his world, that is to say: in his room

(his room in one of Aldo Loris Rossi’s architectures) —

On the day the border guards at the fence steer you toward the next opening come come come

(it opens for you, that is to say: not for everyone) —

On this February 4th I have not seen the sun for 14 days. I place my fingers like snow goggles to my face, I look through the slits. Ice desert. Clean lines, the superfluous. An acute angle into which nothing fits. A glaring white that tapers into my eyes.

Afterimage. What I see when I see nothing: the glow of my nerves. Myelin flicker.

Neurons die when they are not used. Why should that not also apply to human beings?, a cognitive scientist writes in an email to a human trafficker.

Superfluous angles, superfluous people. Ice, liquefied. To google something, to fail: nostalgia for reliable calculations. For older computers. Electricity jolts through your eye.

A microscope out of focus — I direct my gaze toward the useless cell whose division would yield even less use, if that were possible, if only one could divide by zero.

To capture the afterimage, with knuckles pressed into the eye sockets.

On the day I see Aldo Loris Rossi explaining the maps, the maps of his world, that is to say: the tarot; when I hear him speak of cold polarity, is he not speaking of the snow at the crossroads?

(I myself draw the Ace of Swords, draw, in layman’s terms, a card that represents the moment in which one can see the world from a new point of view) —

The child in the house whose globe is a basketball, whose sun is a moon. The utterly absorbed child.

And beyond the towers — chain-link, border fences, as the sea is one, forests, as they separate the dead from the living.

When they come to fetch me to help me beckoning

come come come
Baltic summer nights
a white stripe of horizon even at night
white like the snow like the ash of the Phlegraean Fields Behind me the path is sealed again until one comes for whom the opening fits until one comes and stands there before the law before the entrance that is intended for him alone.

And it says:
In the end his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether it is truly growing darker around him, or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. Yet in the darkness he now perceives a radiance that breaks inextinguishably from the door of the law. But he does not live much longer.

After the image, before the law. Afterimage — the glow that emerges from the slit between my fingers, here, at the crossroads, on February 4th, the sky glaring white.

Aldo Loris
Al-Dolores All that pain le pain que nous nourrit futile inutile

Later I will

Then the city began to climb these hills
And it invaded this whole territory

PIAZZA PLEBISCITO

Text by Enis Maci