Castello di Ama is winery located in a very small hamlet in Tuscany. Over the last 17 years, the owners have commissioned remarkable site-specific artworks. I wrote about our visit with our family in an earlier post. I highly recommend this stop in Italy with or without your children. One of the more recent commissions in the collection is Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “The Confession of Zero.”

After walking in the small chapel at Castello di Ama, continue behind the altar to an intimate, curved space. Squeezed into this small rounded spac is a large sculpture made out of marble and steel. The descending and ascending forms are based on a mathematical model for zero. The two forms do not meet in the middle. There is a tiny vacant space in between. It is a physical experience of zero, something that by it’s nature has no physical existence. In addition, a camera obscura in the small window covers the sculpture with a picture of the landscape. Inside this dark and quiet room hidden inside the chapel, the picture reminds you where you are and that there is an outside world.  “Confession of Zero” is not just a moment to think about math, but to meditate on things that have no physical presence in a physical world. Or better to question what you know and don’t know about the invisible world.