The Wish-Key
(2021)

This wish key is there to provide the facility to open/unlock and close/lock that is so necessary in the perverse interplay of borderlines of human desire.

That irrepressible zone between life and death, the sense of fullness and of void, between motionlessness and movement, between the target and the destination, between desire and gratification, where all our human experience takes place.

In the kind of bizarre psycho-physical condition that contemporary mankind has had no choice but to face in the last two years of 2020-2021, a tension has been generated between the limits of contingency and of personal desire. The latter grown numb and in most cases alienated, in its turn generated a new condition of tension that is vitally intrinsic to the human condition, yet is moving towards new and unpredictable evolutions.

De Pinto is proposing a disturbing game with unexpected emotional fallout.

Players will be given the chance to take part in the performance, but on two conditions: they must choose between an ordinary cup of rather tasteless tea and a shot of strong whisky and then choose just one symbol card. The game of their lives will depend on it: on a choice and, as always, on a desire between two borders, to yield or to fight.

This is a game for two, where a drawing is revealed and, with it, a written destiny; from a conscious choice made by both players: the guest chooses, De Pinto reveals.

Players who decide to join in will have a face-to-face with one of their deepest fears: learning about their own future. A desire as ancient as the human race itself, a move in the game that will determine and mark these participants’ future; maybe for no more than an instant, as long as it takes for a nervous laugh; maybe for eternity, where lurk the times of nocturnal demons.

Do you want to play? Here are a few basic rules

You can only join the game if you are 18 or over, since that is the age limit set by the law in Switzerland governing the consumption of spirits. If you choose the alternative to whisky, your tea will be served with no sugar and no sweeteners, so as to cater for any health issues you may have or for your preference not to consume any artificial sweeteners.

If you choose to drink whisky, you must be capable of drinking spirits in the knowledge that they will not be in any way harmful for your physical and/or mental health.

You will join the performance as a single participant. The maximum number of participants who can join the performance is 48. This is a technical limit set by the delivery of a work of art, an authentic one-off that will become the player’s own property, of which the artist has produced a limited edition of 48 pieces. Once all 48 works have been handed over, the entire cycle of performance will be declared complete.

Access to the performance is on the basis of first-come-first-served.

The choice of the playing cards available, originally 48 of them, will be reduced as the game proceeds, until it is inevitably reduced to the last work, with no chance to change it; just as the inevitable destiny of our lives chooses for us, in that destiny that is maybe already fatally written for us or that we shall maybe design intentionally for ourselves.

In this period of so much mourning, for De Pinto this is a profoundly felt and necessary act of sharing. Working with numbers binds De Pinto to the symbolic meanings of the leading principles of the doctrine of ideas and to the studies of alchemical symbols.

Dedicated to Rodney Waters

In memory of Martin Disler
Carlo Santamaria
Giancarlo Tognetti
Jean-Luc Nancy

Pier Giorgio De Pinto, August 2021.
Translation by Pete Kercher