Riscritture (2020 - onoging series)

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“As the sand flows between the fingers, so it merges the space. Time takes it away with it and does not leave me but shapeless shreds. Writing: meticulously trying to hold back something, to make something survive: to snatch some precise crumbs from the void that is being excavated, to leave, somewhere, a groove, a trace, a mark or some sign." Georges Perec

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Riscritture (Rewritings) is an ongoing series of ink-on-paper works in which Riccardo Rizzetto reappropriates words, phrases, and citations from others, reterritorialising them through handwriting.
Each work begins with a borrowed fragment — a line from a book, a sentence overheard, a common saying — which, once rewritten, loses its original context and author. What remains is a palimpsest of gestures, where meaning and form collapse into one another.

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The act of writing becomes an act of drawing; language turns into pattern. The handwriting, deliberately slow and imperfect, transforms the word into a visual rhythm that resists the accelerated consumption of text characteristic of the contemporary age. What was once penalised — the “bad handwriting” that teachers deemed unreadable — now becomes a mode of reclamation, a way of forcing attention, deceleration, and intimacy between reader and sign.

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Through this process, Riscritture questions authorship, originality, and legibility itself.
Words, stripped of their functional role, acquire a tactile dimension: they oscillate between sense and non-sense, between the visible and the illegible. The gesture of writing — repetitive, obsessive, meditative — becomes a means of thinking through the hand, of engaging the body in a material dialogue with language.

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In this sense, Riscritture operates as a form of reterritorialisation (Deleuze & Guattari): it reclaims fragments from the uncontrolled flux of words that saturates everyday life — from media feeds to urban signage — and relocates them into a different register of experience. The written surface becomes a site of resistance, where the excess of language is slowed, condensed, and re-signified.

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Each page thus carries the trace of a double movement: the disappearance of meaning and the emergence of form. The words are not rewritten to be read but to be felt — to recover, through their physical repetition, a different kind of attention and presence.

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In Riscritture, handwriting is not an ornament but an instrument of thought: a way to translate the noise of language into texture, and the everyday surplus of words into a new form of silence.

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Ink on paper, various dimensions.