BILL 6

‘Bill’ is annual magazine that prioritises visual reading of its photographic stories without the distraction of text.

Millions of shreds of paper blew
here and there, all over the place,
wet with rain, dried up by the sun,
slowly losing their original colors,
very slowly dissolving and leaving
traces of their existence for a long
time and then slowly disappearing,
slowly vanishing into the grass, into
the bushes, into the earth.
That thin, flying paper, those bits
of paper that cost nothing and
were worth nothing, those shreds
of newspapers that had announced
immense wars, or ordinary births, or
triumphal victories, or unexpected
inventions, ridiculous scandals or
calamities of every description and
equally frequent idiocies, or those
other bits of paper that had wrapped
sweet Sunday pastries, and the other
bits that had wrapped old mended
shoes, left here and there, for a long
time, the faintest shadow of what
had happened.
All those pieces of paper left a
kind of dead silent warning on the
subject of the general ambiguity of
events, of the general doubleness
of connections between events,
even about the actual dusty material
that the events are made of; a
material always liable to vanish with
breathing. Like the dust of pastels
on paper? Like certain uncertain
lines or signs only just visible,
abandoned lines, with no spaces to
join them together, lines ready to
disappear at once?!

Sottsass, Ettore, “Francessco, Libertine of Mysteries,” Fransesco Clemente: Three Worlds, New York, Rizzoli International Publications 1990