The exhibition continues until 21 September Fleas more than before, now, set up to House of Memory of Milan on the occasion of the 80 years of the liberation in which the artist Valerio Eliogabalo Torrisi dialogue with the resistant archives, edited by Salvatore Cristofaro.
Part of the official schedule of the Municipality of Milan Time of peace and freedom. Eighty years of liberation, The exhibition proposes a poetic and civil reflection on the value of memory through the language of contemporary art. Far from any rhetorical celebration, Fleas more than before, now It is rooted in the archive materials kept inside the House of Memory – in particular those of the AED (ex -deporte National Association in the Nazi fields) and of the National Institute Ferruccio Parri – To give voice to submerged stories, forgotten bodies, letters and diaries that tell broken lives but stubborn in their dignity.
«I hear the fleas everywhere: on our bodies, on the words they use, on the geographies polymorphic that we live and we would like to call home. (…) I see fleas everywhere, more than before, now »transcribes the curator in the introductory text Salvatore Cristofaro. It is from this image – taken from an anonymous diary of a military internship – that the exhibition takes shape: a condition of infestation that becomes a metaphor for the present, in which “extremisms become central nuclei of power” and the principles of resistance seem increasingly obscured by “nostalgic rites, re -emerged from the beats of the time”.
The works on display are all unpublished, the result of months of study and comparison of the artist with archival documents. Torrisi has worked closely with letters of condemned to death, testimonies of deportees, stories of confinement and illegal lives. “Stories of warrior sisters, broken love stories that traveled on letters sewn on the back of strangers” – writes Cristofaro – intertwine in an exhibition path that returns dignity to the most fragile and radical gesture: write, even when the fingers are broken, to leave a trace, a farewell, a promise.
“What does it really mean to be a political artist?” Torrisi is asked. «Existing, walking on the street, bringing around your person, occupying a space is already political in itself. Talking, using words, is political. And political are the works of any artist who lives the contemporary. ” An awareness matured over time, which has strengthened when, invited to confront the archives of the Resistance, has chosen to focus on the “small stories of” any people “, being the real resistance, that made of hidden cards, written in a hurry, of strategies to be agreed in the back of a church”.
There are three main works on display: Canti from courtyard: a photographic installation inspired by a design created by Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso during captivity. The work reimmagina the evening meeting place of the “Romans” – companions of captivity united by singing – “no longer sketched in pencil, but documented by one of them, to bring over time the moment of light -heartedness, not the prison”, explains Torrisi. A gesture of emotional resistance, which celebrates the strength of the community also in places of pain.
Last songs: A participatory installation built around the last letters kept at the Parri Institute. Archive boxes are transformed into monumental elements on which hundreds of sheets are placed with phrases written in red that report some passages from farewell letters, from messages to mother, from thoughts to children: simple, powerful words, crossed by dignity, resignation, obstinacy. The public is invited to take them into charge, to accompany them symbolically on their interrupted journey, towards those who should have received them.
Other phrases are visible on LED screens distributed for the city of Milan, to get to all and to everyone, to also sing the urban space, transforming the memory into a living and collective presence.
New song: A choral video installation created with the collaboration of the LGBTQIA+ Milanese Checcoro choir, inspired by a dream kept in the cells of a political prison: a new hymn to freedom, “with Din Don Dan and with ideas of a free world”, as told by Dario Venegoni, national president of Aned. Pulci more than before, now it is not only an exhibition, but a collective gesture, a feast of memory that entrusts art the task of guarding and relaunching the values of the resistance. As Cristofaro says: “It is an exhibition that speaks of choirs, improvised choirs in the name of freedom, resistance, yesterday’s struggle for today, for a free, community and resistant world. An archive exhibition: an archive of lives that find themselves fighting again, writing and singing to defend that freedom that eighty years ago was hard conquered “.
Fleas more than before, now It is therefore a song: fragile and political, individual and choral. A plural work that entrusts art the task of telling the story through stories, without heroisms, without rhetoric. As Torrisi concludes: «They are no longer single important stories, in the journalistic sense, but many small stories that create history. Many parts that create a great narrative ».
