Selected image by Flashback
for Opera Viva Barriera di Milano
Piazza Giovanni Bottesini
Turin/ITALY
2019
all the things that we need/ billboard, 2015-2019 | ink-jet on paper | 300 x 580 cm
billboard view
The third billboard of Opera Viva Barriera di Milano, the second of the two ones that were selected through an open call and awarded by Flashback’s jury, is a work by Nero/Alessandro Neretti titled All the Things that We Need (2015).
The image, which connects Barriera di Milano, northern suburbs of Turin, to the northern and southern suburbs of the world, is one of the results of a residence spent by Nero in December 2015 during the 6th International EgeArt Days in Izmir, in Turkey. The portrayed place, the ruins of the Kadifekale, is a typical contemporary margin, a place that becomes the crossroad of stories and destinies.
As the artist states: “I realized that crossing alone a territory where Syrian refugees – and the Kurds before them – where trying to survive amongst the decay of crumbling housings, barbered wire and garbage, places where the social despair of some blends to the will of standing out (at all cost) of others, would have not been a great idea for many, but – rather – a way to look for trouble… for me, instead, it kept on being essential. Nourishing oneself, not caring for such precariousness, far from sumptuous theaters and famous characters, at the shadow of the lighted promenades, where a sort of sleek reality relegates the other truths beyond the hill”.
Nero’s work locates in this suspended, in-between area in this contrast and comparison between the emerged urban world and the submersed one, between the visible world and the invisible one. As it has become a tradition of Opera Viva Barriera di Milano, also this poster tells us that the margins are not borders to be crossed more or less quickly, but territories to be permanently inhabited and to be known as appropriate, right because it is there that the present time reveals itself clearly.
Text from press release.
