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_{From the exhibit Private Lighterature . Townsend Center for the Humanities , University of California, Berkeley, October 25th 2006 - January 10th 2007. Dedicated to Aurélie Vialette.}  

_{Special thanks to Tony Cascardi & Teresa Stojkov}

^Here you are the Rubik's cube. Or this other sort of magic cubes, normally on sale at museum souvenir stores. I own one of them, from the Van Gogh Museum. The cube, as cube, does not make much sense. It is only a series of disordered fragments belonging to images that we recognize as soon as we perceive a dominant color, a texture: over here, the bright yellow of the sunflowers, in this other face the wet and muddy trail going up trough the wasteland.

I act on two of the cube’s hinges and six images bloom before my eyes in an unexpected fashion: an almond tree, a visage, a hamlet, boats run aground, a bed, sunflowers, another hamlet… no, wait, it’s the same as before, I have turned the cube around too many times.  I act again on one hinge and the cube becomes a different, irregular solid body: behold in front of me the panoramic landscape, crows taking off in my presence; again, and you can see a town in Provence.  On two energetic wrist turns, the cube comes back to its amorphous, fragmentary, troubling state. The kleenex box in front of me, the very same one I sometimes use to cry about a certain recollection, works under the same principle. The same principle, again, under which worked a cubic-shaped portrait holder that my parents had around the time I was about to turn ten. I played with it as if it were a spinning top: the holder rotated, showing sometimes one portrait, sometimes another, sometimes showing the portrait lying on one side, sometimes inverted. On one of its faces, there was a family picture that only three years later would be impossible to retake. Today, twenty-nine full years have passed since this picture could not be retaken. It remains solely in this cube: now you can see it, now you cannot.

Here you are the brother for whom I have been looking for twenty-nine full years. The Hero, the Odysseus of Polymorphous Ingenious whose height put me down here, the scriptura continua of History, the courageous Prometheus who did not even have the opportunity to be chained. The daring, beautiful, unique, figure of every single one fourteen years older than me. I turn the cube, here they are the photographs that could not be exhibited here: putting the fist aloft among the greys, going away like a lamb, coming back as a lion.