Territory / Extraction
The land remembers what the map erases.
An installation held in an abandoned children's colony inside a post-war utopian village in the Dolomites — an ex-ENI company town, its dormitories left made, its mattresses stencilled and returned to the beds.
The last children who slept in this colony left in the early nineties. They are now the age their fathers were then. The stencil arrives as an alibi thirty years late: it was not me, it was one of my friends.In every recollection, the friend is someone else — a boy who since moved abroad, a warden who since died, a name no one wrote down. The dormitory is empty. They are still awake in it.
Resilience is a word that has been laundered. A stuffy symptom of a pathology no one wants to name. What the institution could not repair, the vocabulary agreed to hide.
What the institution could not remember, the friend was invented to forget.
From False Friends (2017), installation in a derelict Italian children's colony.