A few days ago, passing through Piazza delle Vaschette, in Rome just behind my house, I noticed an old Volkswagen Beetle, evidently stationary for quite some time, around which luxuriant burdocks and other wild grasses were growing between one cobblestone and another.
As I duly photographed it, and went back to pick it up again a few days later, some rather obvious and somewhat melancholic thoughts about the passing of time, its linearity and unidirectionality, in short, about growing old, were going through my mind.
Then on reflection, it seemed to me that this business of time passing is much more complicated and ambiguous: it is very true that time flows like Heraclitus’ river in which the same water will never pass through the same place twice, but it is equally true that any object, any memory, whether personal or collective, any trace of the past by the very fact of existing here and now, is part of our individual or collective present and all the more so of our future, together with the present moment in time of becoming past.
So I put together a few images relating to this continuous overlapping, using the Beetle as the guiding spirit of this work.
While I was putting together these images and the accompanying text, I happened to pass by that square again and the Volkswagen Beetle was no longer there, probably taken for scrap.
I hope this counts as an epitaph.
