On the Making of Signboards

Corporeal Inscriptions and Material Transpositions of the Writing into the Written

Abstract

During the last forty years, a parallel yet separate reflection has unfolded across the Atlantic. While European semioticians have developed the concept of enunciation to tackle the relationship between the linguistic system and its concrete instantiations, North American linguistic anthropologists have explored discursive processes and their sedimentation as texts through the lens of entextualization. A key and partially overlooked aspect within both intellectual traditions concerns the materiality of the actual production, through gestural acts of inscription, of text-artifacts. In this paper, I focus on the enunciative-cum-artistic practice of a renowned sculptor, Arnaldo Pomodoro, to explore the process of turning discourse (and gestures) into text(-artifact)s. I draw on the artist’s archive, on the critical literature about his work and combine these findings with direct observations and interviews conducted in the sculptor’s atelier to describe Pomodoro’s intermedial practice of negative inscription into a variety of substrates (e.g., cuttlebone, clay) and its positive transduction by casting molten metals into gypsum plaster or fiberglass molds. I argue that analyzing non-verbal forms of enunciation and entextualization may shed light onto our professional semiotic ideologies, furthering our understanding of crucial aspects of textuality and enunciation, such as the tension between structure and event, durable and ephemeral, and figurative and plastic.