On December 12th, 1969, a bomb exploded in the Piazza Fontana branch of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Milan. That same morning Giuseppe Pinelli finished his night shift at the Stazione Garibaldi railway station and made his way home to his wife and two daughters in Via Preneste 2. After resting a little, a friend called by and Pinelli went out to a bar in Via Mario Morgantini, from which in the afternoon he continued to the Ponte della Ghisolfa anarchist club in Piazza Lugano. From here he went to another anarchist club in Via Scaldasole, where he was found by police officers who called him into the Milan police headquarters in Via Fatebenefratelli for questioning, along with many other anarchists, in relation to the bomb attack earlier that same afternoon. Pinelli emerged from the police station two days later, on the night of December 16th, falling from the fourth floor office of Commissioner Luigi Calabresi. He was taken unconscious to the Fatebenefratelli hospital, where he died. I have retraced the itinerary that Pinelli took on his last day as a free man, from the station to his home, then on to the bar and to the anarchist clubs and finally to the police station. For a total length of 18,900 metres, this is a route that any of us could take any day of our lives, a meaningless route that disappears as we walk.
My project is to use 1 centimetre thick slate slabs measuring 60x60 centimetres, onto which there have been scratched 98, 3-millimetre thick and 2-centimetre deep lines. Each slab is scratched with a total of 58.8 metres of lines, which in the 322 slabs that make up the entire work amounts to a total of 18,900 metres of lines, corresponding to the total distance walked by Pinelli. If arranged in a space that is large enough to contain the entire length of the work, the slabs should be arranged on the floor. If the work is arranged in a space that is not large enough for this, the extra slabs should be piled up at a certain point.