Gianni Motti is a kind of Zelig. He creates uncodified, unpredictable situations, complicating habitual perceptions of reality and amplifying its contradictions.

An infiltrator by vocation, he chooses to adapt to what happens around him, appropriates external events, takes note of circumstances, and acts accordingly. The newspaper is his primary source of inspiration.

Natural phenomena do not escape his attention: as a terrorist, he claims responsibility for the devastating 1992 Los Angeles earthquake. In a video, he records the moon’s trajectory in such a way that it seems to be directly governed by his will. He declares himself the author of solar and lunar eclipses, announcing their dates for years through special invitation cards.

Now the Big Crunch becomes his posthumous work: Motti once again wrong-foots the myth of the artist as creator by appropriating nothing less than the end of the world.

The era of mechanical time is over; we’ve become accustomed to the precision of quartz clocks. But nothing has really changed—time remains beyond any possibility of control. Science, with no other recourse, simply measures it.

The year 1999 was marked by millenarian obsession, around which reflections, fears, and hopes coalesced, amplified by the media to the point of saturation. And yet it’s well known that changing the cultural system of reference yields different models for measuring time.

In fact, one datum exists: scientists have calculated that in 5 billion years the Big Crunch—the explosion of the sun—will disintegrate the solar system and the Earth. But it’s a disarming datum, as difficult to grasp as the concept of eternity. It offers little reassurance, since in its concreteness, it prompts reflection on how, in the end, nothing is truly guaranteed.

Gianni Motti has created a digital clock, equipped with 20 digits, capable of counting down the years, days, hours, minutes, seconds, tenths of a second... that remain for the sun before the explosion that will destroy it; and for the Earth to complete its rotations before disintegrating.

The clock was activated on September 24, 1999 in Berlin. It is powered by solar energy—the very same that will destroy our planet.

Gabi Scardi