WHERE THE DISTANT BEGINS

2011

curated by Silvia Litardi

a work for Space Metropoliz, MAAM museum of Otherness and Elsewhere

exhibition included in 2011 Circuit of the FotoGrafia Festival - International Festival in Rome.

 

The work was conceived and created as part of the artistic and film project "Space Metropoliz" by Fabrizio Boni and Giorgio de Finis and is produced in collaboration with [DIPSU] Faculty of Architecture - University of Roma Tre, Province of Rome - Rome Creative Province.

Where the distant begins was born from the artist's encounter with the multi-ethnic community of the Metropoliz, the former Fiorucci sausage factory on the outskirts of Rome. The Metropoliz is a space occupied by various families, Eritrean, Peruvian, Roma, Italian, a concrete utopia, a real and dreamed place from which to start again to imagine a new idea of ​​community.

The work is an installation dedicated by the artist to the women he met at Metropoliz and their children, to the strength and beauty that communicate their mutual support, their dignity, their vitality...

 

The work represents a heterogeneous and open human family-kin, united around the ritual of making bread, an extremely essential symbol that unites everyone.

It consists of 21 flour sieves of different sizes that portray the faces of the women and children of the community through the use of natural powders and pigments. The installation follows the real ritual of making bread: the curator, the artist and the women of Meropoliz, sharing knowledge and traditions, make bread together and cook it in an improvised oven and then offer it on the day of the vernissage to the public of the exhibition.

In ancient times, bread-making was marked by the rhythm of the lunar phases, sourdough was produced only on the day of the full moon and was used for the following 28 days.

The work wants to convey this idea of ​​circularity, rhythm, openness. Some of the sieves let light pass through the faces which thus overlap, allowing a glimpse of other faces which evoke a sort of mobile and enveloping family tree which also includes those who look and are in turn looked at.

 

SPACE METROPOLIZ is a documentary film and a public art project created by Fabrizio Boni and Giorgio de Finis. The authors have thought of a real "cinematic construction site" to give voice to a multi-ethnic community of one hundred and fifty people (Italians, South Americans, North Africans and Romanian Roma) who since 2009 have lived in the former Fiorucci sausage factory on Via Prenestina, today renamed Metropoliz.

The plot, which is inspired by Voyage dans la Lune by Méliès and Miracolo a Milano by De Sica, develops around the construction of the large missile-scenography thanks to which it will be possible to leave for the Moon: the largest public space present in the gravitational system earthly and the only place where we can imagine together new ways of living and community living.

The back stage thus coincides with the film itself and the construction of the rocket is nothing other than the Trojan horse to enter and get to know in depth the stories of migrants who have decided to fight together for the right to housing and for a different city, supportive, multicultural and self-managed, passing through the story of dreams too often suffocated by the necessities of life and the urgency of daily needs.

To fuel the sharing of the creative process, at the basis of the project, and in close collaboration with Progetto Pidgin City [DIPSU] Faculty of Architecture - University of Roma Tre.