MEDIATHEK

A semiologist by his original profession, Umberto Eco is a world-renowned novelist. He connected his love for theories and for art in his book The Infinity of Lists, a collection of lists that authors from Homer to nowadays have woven into their works. An infinite enumeration of ships that, according to Homer’s depiction, left to con- quer Troy is followed by a respectful genealogy of Jesus from the Gospels and a florid description of flowers from Émile Zola. We chose three literary lists, from Eco himself but also from the authors he loved the most (Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino), and we supplemented them with practical lists from our life, beginning with the alphabet. We added our own lists of words in which Eco’s leitmotifs are mirrored, such as mirror whose mirroring fascinates him as a source of further signs and meanings. We ourselves became addicted to lists, not only literary but also musical – the lists of chords, of harmonics, of sounds, of shades of piano and pianissimo. When it comes down to it, through the structure of lists it is possible to get a glimpse of the depth of infinity.