Thirty-five rods approximately 12 cm long, screwed onto an iron plate coated with graphite to form a grid of seven rows by five columns. Various hanging or leaning objects are arranged on this matrix: a German-language course on disc, a garter hook, a leather razor-sharpener case, a desk pencil sharpener, a lock of red hair, an inner tube, three Agfa film spools, a wire brush, two pieces of cross-shaped tyre, a leather camera case, a Juwe brand hair-cutting machine, two white ceramic spools, a shaped wooden item, a military T-26 microphone from the 1940s, a Nazi propaganda book,1 some mastic wrapped in newspaper, a glass electric insulator, a knife- sharpening stone, a quill, an anti-mosquito coil, a small shelf consisting of a knife-sharpening stone holding a vintage photograph and some polyurethane foam, a leather suitcase handle, and a woman’s wedge sandal. Exhibited for the first time alongside Appendiarte (inv. 532) at the ‘Autobiografia come teoria’ exhibition (inv. 2171), the artist described this work in a text with the same title: ‘I reconstruct my Zia Ines, from the 1920s, the family’s adventurous black sheep, indulgent but, when all is said and done, a modern girl, ahead of her time.’ Mauri also mentions Zia Ines in the text of the installation Preistoria come storia (inv. 901): ‘[My father’s] older sister Ines, who married Marquis Cavalletti, eloped with a singer called Gabré, an emulator of Rodolfo Valentino.’

1. The book is Hitler har sagt det (Hitler Says No) by Hermann Rauschning, former National Socialist Prime Minister of the Free State of Danzig (1944).