I began this series of booklets to keep a record of the projections done for the seasonal series of mixed media events. As seasonal brought together sounds and visuals in a dialogically open environment, I became interested in the idea of exploring the relationships between these found slides - mnemonic fragments that had lost connection with their original context.
The booklets layout reflects the typical performance setup, where two projection screens were juxtaposed in a room allowing for the brief encounter of two slides. The title, Temporary Sequence, points to the ephemeral and arbitrary nature of this encounter, and to the way in which narratives can develop in the mind of the observer. I see these narratives as mental lines, an invisible web connecting people and situations actually distant in both space and time. Various degrees of exhibitionism and voyeurism interlock to create an experience that is ultimately quite personal and subjective.

Not all of the the slide sequences have been translated into booklets - only one for each season. Although these published sequences were named after the progressive number of the slide show and the season, I also kept working names that reflect my own preoccupations with each one. The first booklet in the series (Temporary sequence #4/fall) was subtitled Quasi Random, referring to the fact that I had been picking slides from a large pool to arrange them without a predefined narrative order, as an improvised composition. I wanted each couple of slides to define its own enclosed moment.

With the following two sequences I had given up this intent. I had realized that as the mind tries to make sense of whatever it encounters, hypothetical narratives spontaneously arise. If I could not reject my role as a sort of narrator, I would play along with it instead. Sequence #7/winter was subtitled Horror Vacui, and based on a series of events that I had arbitrarily attributed to the "characters" in the booklet. I felt like piecing together a sort of puzzle whose parts had been found scattered around the world. The meaning of this puzzle, although clear to me, was to be subjectively re-defined by the spectators.

#9/spring, subtitled Black and/or White, works on the same principle. Where in the former I had thought of a commentary on facts and people around me, here the story is somewhat more self-centered. I see it as a sort of self portrait made of others and to a great extent by others. Still, this concept is no more than an internal device, not actually available to the seasonal spectator. Again, each one sees his or her own narrative through my story made of someone else's pictures.

With #10/summer I've been looking for a way to break the "rule of the sequence." I wanted to let the slides as free as possible from my arbitrary story-telling. That's why each printed booklet contains a different arrangement of the same 36 slides. The sequences are picked from randomly generated combinations, as if for each booklet the slide trays fell and the original arrangement was lost.

The booklets have been printed and hand bound at Ruben Noise Studio, Brooklyn. The slides were scanned at Pacific Third Studio, Brooklyn. All the slides have been collected over the previous seven years from friends' attics, flea markets and various dumps in Europe and North America. Between 2003 and 2005 I have produced a few hundreds of the fourTemporary sequences, most of which were traded for other hand-made objects or records, used gear, food...
A pdf version of Temporary sequence #4 is available in the downloads section.

I am immensely thankful to all photographers and photographed. A very special thank you goes out to Alessandro Bazzani, Esther Bourdages, John Dolan and Sonia Campagnola.