More than four hundred handwritten notebooks are displayed in piles within specially designed museum showcases. As is often the case with Peter Friedl’s projects, juxtaposition and overexposure are the very dynamics. The Diaries is an epic staging of real time, memory, volume, and text on paper. Thousands upon thousands of densely filled pages covering a period of over forty years testify to the impossibility of capturing bare life in words. Like Friedl’s other long-term projects such as Playgrounds (since 1995) and Theory of Justice (1992–2010)—both based on documentary photographic images—his diary installation is a study in narration. As private books and authentic documents authored equally by professional writers and amateurs, diaries sit ambivalently on the threshold of literature and history. Their centuries-long tradition has given rise to many ways of constructing, documenting and revoking subjectivity. By blocking access to the contents of his enshrined, closed diaries, Friedl invites the viewer to contemplate the multi-layered meaning of how aesthetic experience and imagination work. In an era of open access and ubiquitous surveillance, overabundant communication and information, the artist’s “real allegory” takes on critically new importance. It questions the power of display and imagination, the drama of form and content as well as the fragility of autonomy. The Diaries plays with notions of the anachronistic, precarious, and unfinished.