R E S I D U I photozine #3
EN
It’s almost 10 am in Milan and only a thin line separates the sky from the grey expanse of the city. A line of steel, concrete and pollution. This is where Giorgio Bartocci lives and from his flat in North of Loreto, the third story “remnants” begins.
The set here is no longer an abandoned factory, but a quarter nearby the city center, a place with its own identity, multiracial culture, made of real people, families, drug dealing and a desolated land made of rails. Observing it from the top, you can only see buildings, abandoned places, concrete, iron, roofs, trains, houses, square shapes; everything is stuck together and mixed like in one big monochromatic canvas. The few colors there are part of the same palette, as for the diptych “Fluid architectures”: tones-on-tones are repeated, they overlap, producing scraps of the same color, dripping like the sap, which moves the city.
Fluid connections, shared stories of lives entangled “in this restless time”, travelling quickly on their own path. Green does not exist, if not in transit on regional trains. Its chromatic instability reflects that of contemporaneity: the uncertainty of tomorrow, of the individual, of homologation (and globalization) as the only salvation. Anxiety and frenetic living are in contrast with the search of new communication means, of primitive gestures able to communicate with a few traits. “Less is more” quoted the architect Van der Rohe last century. The search for simplicity as a divination of the future is a constant evolving need. It is not enough to turn back time, we are faced with the search for a modern simplicity able to satisfy both the sensory and intellectual spheres combining the media and interactive playgrounds together.
The city as environment of sociality has the guise of a decomposed and changing place, being home to billions of people leaving traces of their passage, consciously or not. The city is like a search engine with an engulfing speed able to generate different actions on the road, as if the road was a sheet of a book in constant revision. The artistic intervention then is no longer just the ultimate goal, but a process, an experimentation, a reused artifact to produce something new. A bucket of bitumen becomes, months later, a primitive being creating a continuity code, a personal search, an evolutionary memory that is the daughter of a gestural and residual art.
The “surplus” produced by the cities is the starting point for sensitive, visionary people. There are those who see rubbish, leftovers, scraps, others who instead perceive them as remnants of life from which to start the process of creation.
It is about 5:00 pm and it is still difficult to distinguish the sky from the city. Milan is always the same but slowly, day after day, it changes.
Flavia De Marco
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