“Towards the end of the Sixties, after a long period of existential and creative effort, in an atmosphere of linguistic experiment, and to escape the transience and ambiguity of the word, I returned to the sign itself, to the Urzeichen, to the primordial, undifferentiated sign that precedes the word. It was a new start, shifting the gaze to the beginning, to the Ursprung, a pure act of writing, a primeval communicative energy that schooled and realised itself in the sign that in its evolution is writing — scription, to quote Roland Barthes. It denudes writing of sense to charge it with other values.

I save writing from its enslavement to sense: writing purified of sense. I return to the zero point, the semantic zero, the semantic void: silence as a germinating source.

I give autonomy back to the sign, to the body of writing, in order to give voice to the silence, to the void. To the thoughts unthought. Writing is not linked to knowing, but to being. Writing is the home of being. I free writing from sense and highlight its structure, its skeleton, the nude sign, the sign that is such and does not refer back to anything but itself. It refers to the energy reserve, to the initial drive, the source-giving urge, the desire to reveal itself, to emerge from the secret, closed place of night.

Nonverbal writing, writing that remains in silence, original truth. Writing becomes image, a manifestation of being, of being there, in the absolute without form. An open text. A text for all. For those who know how to read and those who do not know how to read. I shift the text from literature to the visual arts. Meanwhile, even in the world that surrounds us, images tend to replace words. Invasively. Television and advertising are just two examples.

Writing, place of perdition and discovery.”

Irma Blank, Milan, 2001