Vittoria Martini: Thomas Hirschhorn: The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival. The Ambassador’s Diary

The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival is an artwork, a sculpture, created by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn in a peripheral borough of Amsterdam’s south-east known as the Bijlmer in 2009. This book recounts the event through the eyes of its Ambassador , art historian Vittoria Martini, who was invited by the artist to be an eyewitness to the existence of this precarious work. A term Hirschhorn sees as positive and creative: a means of asserting the importance of the moment and of the place, of asserting the Here and Now to touch eternity and universality. Appreciating the art historian’s presence as a central element of his sculpture, Hirschhorn consciously challenged the certainties of the profession by empowering and activating the role, thus leading Martini to find a new working methodology that she calls precarious art history . Accompanying the readers through her experience of the physical existence of The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival, Martini’s commentary leads to the profound understanding of how a work that no longer exists physically, can live on in the mind- elsewhere, at some other time-because in the meantime it has become universal.