Miroslaw Balka’s installation in the courtyard of the former prison of San Domenico in San Gimignano is the result, as are all the works of the Polish artist, of concentrated interaction with the connotations of the location that houses it. If this space could speak, it would recount the multitude of stories and supressed desires of the inmates who once spent their recreation period here, always in the same way.


Twelve second-hand chairs are arranged on rotating platforms around the pre-existing well. On each base there is also an alabaster vase containing a nettle plant. On the one hand the artist reminds us of the presence of the former inhabitants, for whom time passed in a context where nothing or almost nothing ever happened, where the days, months and years were scanned by flat repetition and where the ghosts of past and future inevitably became their most faithful companions; on the other hand, he articulates a wider discourse that transcends the relation with the space and its associated historical connotations, becoming a wider, implicitly existential reflection on the passing of time.Balka invites viewers to metaphorically seat themselves on the chairs: each person is in that moment the missing presence, ready to be welcomed on the empty chair. Focussing poetically on absence, the artist emphasizes the perception of subjective time. Being free or being imprisoned therefore concerns not only the explicit condition experienced by the inmates, but touches on something with which all human beings are constantly having to come to terms. This emerges clearly, for example, each time we are faced with a choice and are confronted, often painfully, with the wall that we ourselves have built from within.