The House of Asterion is the title of a short story published in 1947 in the newspaper Los anales de Buenos Aires and later included by Borges in the first edition of El Aleph, one of his most famous works. The title of the collection comes from its final story, The Aleph: “the place where all places on earth are found, seen from every angle, without confusion.” This image evokes, by analogy, the labyrinths erected and inhabited in many of his other tales (including The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths and Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth), casting a particular light on The House of Asterion, its conjectures, and its infinite temples and seas. Immeasurability is perhaps the attribute that best defines the labyrinth.
The text takes the form of a monologue, interrupted only at the end by a sudden shift in voice that signals the resolution of the story. Condemned to isolation by the terror his appearance inspires in others, Asterion leads a solitary existence in his labyrinthine house. Here, he has devised distractions to pass the time: he runs through stone corridors, throws himself from a terrace, meditates on the structure of the world, and sleeps to wake up surprised by the changed color of the day. His favorite game is to imagine another Asterion with whom to converse. This illusory double, which hints at the infinite nature of the building, cannot, however, free Asterion from his condition, from which he awaits deliverance. The prophecy announcing the arrival of his redeemer makes his solitude less harsh: “If my hearing could perceive all the sounds of the world, I would hear his footsteps. May he take me to a place with fewer corridors and fewer doors!” An impatient waiting, which reveals little about the protagonist’s nature and instead connects to the unusual building that houses him. Borges reinforces this idea in Labyrinth (1969): Each seeks the other. If only this were the last day of waiting. Impatience and waiting are but corners and clearings of every labyrinth.
If the Aleph is one of the points in space that contain all points, The House of Asterion is as vast as the world. This is the labyrinth of Crete, whose center was the Minotaur, imagined by Dante as a bull with a man’s head, and in whose stone web so many generations were lost. Its unlocked doors are open day and night; its rooms, courtyards, and fountains, endlessly repeating, suggest the impossibility of finding definitive meaning—of grasping an exit or the center of an architecture that man himself creates the moment he tries to escape it. What happens when one enters the labyrinth? Is it possible to forge one’s own path and exit?
The labyrinth, like every language, proposes a spacing, a division in space, which does not command space but lies along the way. A path that would not need to be found but would remain to be realized. Every architectural place, every habitability, presupposes this: that the building lies on a road, at a crossroads, enabling coming and going. There is no building without roads leading to it or away from it, nor a building without roads inside it—without paths, stairs, corridors, doors (Jacques Derrida, The Arts of Space: Writings and Interventions on Architecture).
Derrida imagines the labyrinth as roads that know no hierarchy and lead to no center. The road (hodόs) is not a method (méthodos). It is not a map, the result of an abstract process meant to explain the road, master it, and reproduce it. The difficulty, then, is how to exist within this labyrinth in which we are entangled, “the labyrinth of language.”
In 1970, Claudio Parmiggiani created the first labyrinth of broken glass, an artwork he would repeat over the years (for example, in 1995 at MAMCO in Geneva; in 1998 at the Promotrice delle Belle Arti in Turin; in 2003 at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna; in 2006 at the Teatro Farnese in Parma; in 2008 at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris), maintaining the intent to reactivate, like a memory, the original function of the space where the installation is placed. The performance sees him donning heavy armor and gripping a hammer. Accompanied to the center of a glass labyrinth, Parmiggiani strikes the walls until they shatter. What remains is a labyrinth in fragments. Is it possible to escape the labyrinth? Is this what the destruction of its walls suggests?
Glass, rather than concealing, makes the labyrinth observable in every part. The observer’s gaze can traverse its structure, seeking to see what the eye cannot, to make the invisible perceptible, cultivating through the eye a claim of possession. It is this attempt to erase distance that exposes us to blindness or aphasia, that pushes us to flatten things into their literality, rendering them mute. “For Parmiggiani, the vocation of the image, and thus of painting, is not, as for Paul Klee, to make the invisible visible, but to show the impossibility of exhaustively translating the invisible into a visible image—or, if one prefers, to show that within the sensibility of the image there is something that surpasses its visible contour” (Recalcati, The Mystery of Things). The violence of the hammer, breaking the labyrinth’s walls, expresses a refusal of the glass’s excessive transparency to safeguard a space of non-communication. The apparent destruction of the work, or the destructive nature of the performance, accomplishes a revelation, illuminating what Parmiggiani sees as the purpose of art: “an initiation into silence.” An exercise of custody and farewell that, in a way, reestablishes art’s descent from prayer: “It is urgent to show that it is more important to hide than to show” (Parmiggiani, Star Blood Spirit). Like a labyrinth, Parmiggiani’s art does not exhibit but withdraws from sight, conceals, distances. His works speak through an introverted vocabulary that seeks to return images to their shadow.
