Wall. Project excerpt: (2006)
In 2006 I began working with cardboard in the city of Rome, and the material took me to the streets, I became fascinated by cardboard’s afterlife and its resurgence in the fringe communities that harnessed it as an urban building block. Homeless individuals and groups used the material for shelter and street vendors (primarily immigrants) used it for constructing makeshift tables or booths. Cardboard became a catalyst for my dialogue with marginalized communities. I set out to build a vast wall constructed entirely of horizontally stacked cardboard, which was reappropriated trash. Over the course of three months I engaged migrant and homeless communities to help in the construction of this wall by asking them to help me cut and assemble its pieces.
The process of building psychical wall while knocking down social and personal barriers was contradictory; the classical, divisive functions of a wall were negated in the social circumstances of its construction. In the end the wall became a material monument or model confirming that tension: breaking down barriers while building monuments to them.
Still from Performance (Rome, IT) 2006
Still from Performance (Rome, IT) 2006
Still from Performance (Rome, IT) 2006
Still from Performance (Rome, IT) 2006
Still from Performance (Rome, IT) 2006
Still from Performance (Rome, IT) 2006
Still from Performance (Rome, IT) 2006
Still from Performance (Rome, IT) 2006
Still from Performance (Rome, IT) 2006
Final installation (Gallery Cenci, Rome It)