Produced on the occasion of Rossella Biscotti’s 2013 exhibition The Side Room, at Secession, Vienna, 5 July–1 September, 2013. With texts from Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, András Pálffy, Bettina Spörr, Laboratorio Onirico.

Designed by Louis Lüthi.

Published on the occasion of Rossella Biscotti, L’avvenire non può che appartenere ai fantasmi at the Museion Bolzano, Bozen, 31 January–25 May 2015. The solo show, the artist’s first in an Italian museum, traced some of the key stages in her career, without being a retrospective. Biscotti responded to Museion’s invitation by creating new works and presenting traces of existing pieces – the exhibition includes casts of the 2009 project Le Teste in Oggetto, five bronze heads of King Vittorio Emanuele III and Benito Mussolini produced in 1942 for the Universal Expo in Rome, subsequently cancelled, and The Prison of Santo Stefano (2011–13), tracings of parts of the floor and cells of the prison in Italy’s Pontine Island.

The project Il Processo (The Trial, 2010–12) focused on the “April 7 trial” (1983–84), against the members of the leftist revolutionary movement Autonomia Operaia, which was held in the Aula Bunker in Rome—the high-security courthouse in Foro Italico. Biscotti’s research started in 2006—shortly before the building underwent a major transformation from a court to a sports museum. The installation consists of concrete sculptures made from casts of the architectural features of the courtroom, taken before their demolition. These are accompanied by a six-hour audio edited recording of the “April 7 trial”. Defendants in the court case included the philosophers Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, and other intellectuals accused of being ideologically and morally responsible for Italian terrorism developed in the late 1970s.

Between 2010 and 2012, there were a series of performances, in different countries, where the audio is simultaneously live-interpreted by a professional translator, so that the historical testimony becomes reactivated through a contemporary voice and body. During the presentation at dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012 the installation and the performance were simultaneously shown. This publication is an English transcript of the audio translation.

Rossella Biscotti’s 10 × 10 interrelates three histories- the use of punch cards to program both early data processing machines and automated looms (jacquard) respectively, how demographic records have been modeled through census taking, and the legacy of the Haus Esters (1927–1930), a single family villa built by a textile baron- so as to question how statistics and quantitative analysis not only represent a given reality, but how such illustrations may also hide cognitive basis hidden in contemporary profiling methods and other displays.