Five large doormats with five phrases1 carved into them, thoughts in artwork form, legible negatively through contrast with the floor. Made by Fabio Mauri a few weeks before his death, these doormats have five definitive statements on art, the artist, and the universe engraved into them: the public is invited to walk on them, consume them, make them disappear. Marking the crossing of a threshold, the doormat is a liminal object; like a screen, it is a membrane between two worlds, a bearer of content shaped through interaction with the viewer: “Zerbini, to be stepped on, almost as a last resort. Laid out at the entrance to the Rizzo Gallery, trampled until they disappear. The words, concepts, reworkings or interpretations of the patrons and passers-by will survive; the memory of the word trampled on as an event will survive.”2 Mauri had five copies of each doormat made, with the exception of Nessun segno particolare di cultura è fuori da un testo generale storico e nessun testo generale storico o interpretazione di mondo è fuori dall’enigma più generale dell’universo, of which just two copies were made.

1. The five sentences are: “No particular sign of culture is outside a general historical text and no general historical text or world interpretation is outside the most general enigma of the universe”; “I wasn't new”; “Art does because it is history and world”; “The universe, like infinity, we see in pieces”; “Perhaps art is not autonomous”.
2. F. Mauri, Etc. L’ultima parola, in “Flash Art”, n. 277, Milan, August-September 2009, p. 50.