"La differenza vive nella ripetizione" (Difference lives in repetition)
“The role of the imagination, or the mind which contemplates in its multiple and fragmented states, is to draw something new from repetition, to draw difference from it. For that matter, repetition is itself in essence imaginary, since the imagination alone here forms the ‘moment’ of the vis repetitivafrom the point of view of constitution: it makes that which it contracts appear as elements or cases of repetition. Imaginary repetition is not a false repetition which stands in for the absent true repetition: true repetition takes place in imagination. Between a repetition which never ceases to unravel itself and a repetition which is deployed andconserved for us in the space of representation there was difference, the for-itself of repetition, the imaginary”

From the reading of Gilles Deleuze’s text “Difference and Repetition”, and from the passage cited in particular, the idea for this work was born. The work aims to investigate the essence of printmaking by reflecting on a fundamental element of its nature: the reproducibility of the matrix and the repetition of the copy printed from it. With this conceptual operation, the etching “The difference lives in the repetition” metaphorically tells about itself by showing itself in its repetition and highlighting any difference, more or less obvious, between a copy and another. No matter how much we may pursue a formal perfection, no copy will ever be physically the same as another, on the contrary, the very gesture of printing determines the Difference that will be in being precisely in the creation of a copy and in its repetition. The installation, not of a single print, but of the whole print run, aims precisely at showing how in reality Repetition is not a copy of the same but an image of the mind, determined precisely by the repetition of differences and similarities. The very sense of artistic work related to printmaking is characterized by the concept of repetition, both in the gesture and in the print. A print run, if presented as a whole, is the image of Difference and Repetition.