“There are two Italian thinkers that I admire greatly,” says artist Alfredo Jaar as he stands between the rhythmic bars of his 2004 installation Infinite Cell. Jarr is referring to Antonio Gramsci and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Gramsci, a Marxist theorist, is best remembered as a martyr of communist ideology, having died while imprisoned by Benito Mussolini during the Fascist period. The latter, Pasolini, was an a film director, poet, writer and intellectual. “In one of Pasolini’s writings, he says that culture is a prison,” Jarr recalls, “and we intellectuals, we have to get out of that prison.”

Infinite Cell refers to both Pasolini’s metaphorical prison of thought and the literal prison in which Gramsci died for his anti-fascist beliefs. Serving as a symbol for intellectualism in Italy today, the vacant space also represents a void—the absence of a culture capable of revolutionary debate.