Duality as essence The fullness of an almost empty space within which only two presences distil their separated essences; the completeness of only two subjects representing all the rest; the awareness in subordinating oneself to the magnetism of the subtracted and the missing; the consistency of silence, immobility and timelessness; the essential value of otherness. Each of the titles of these duets, all of a single word, carries semantic potentialities inherent in duality, a contradiction resolved in the ideal of recomposing dualism into unity. Ali (Wings), equivalent laterality as duality, which divides in two and equally holds together; Diade (Dyad), couple, duality, and in biology the chromosome of germ cells formed by two homologous chromatids united, maternal and paternal; Talea (Cutting), in botany the birth of a life through another that mutilates and grafts itself; Appulso (Appulse), in astronomy the apparent approach of a star to a planet, so that the star seems to touch it; Giano (Janus), the twoheaded god, who can look at the two entities future and past but not at the present, in charge of thresholds, of passages, who presides over all beginnings; Specchio (Mirror), the reflecting "other", in the mutual comparison of every couple or duo; Cenere (Ash), matter inclusive of the original fullness - simulacrum of what it was - and of it's dissipation, emblem of the invisibility to come; Gemina (Twin), that which is double, an adjective declined here, in Italian, in the feminine, leaving open the interpretation (double musical expression?, a double union of performers?... ), and in genetics the "bivalent pair" of chromosomes, which merges and then splits; Stati (States), in addition to being a noun - the word that in Italian in one of it's meanings is related to staticity, from the Latin status, "that which stands still" -, is also a past participle that makes the subjects exist in the same time for how they are now and for what they have "been", "stati" (thinking of this piece, divided into three parts, in the sequence stasismotionstasis: «You alone knew that motion is not different from stasis.» Eugenio Montale, from Satura); Stigma (Stigma), explicit imprint of an implicit owner of it, but also, in botany, the part of the pistil destined to receive and germinate; Etra (Air), a kind of air that, here, makes physical wind and metaphysical wind copresent, which mix in a haunted vortex... Osvaldo Coluccino