Andrea Balestrero, Nina Fiocco, Ulises Matamoros Ascensión, Rogelio Sánchez Velázquez
Spazio O’, Milano (IT) 2014
“The Salgari Method” is a nomadic art event directed to develop artistic-architectonic installations through a community based process. Emilio Salgari (1862-1911) was an Italian writer who – without traveling outside his nation- wrote numerous novels set in several distant countries distributed on all the continents which he got to know just through news and images found in magazines, books, newspapers. One hundred years later, this mechanism of knowledge of distant places through media (such as the Internet) by renouncing to a direct experience has become totally ordinary for everyone. With the aim to reflect on this way to “know from a distance”, our project establishes a dialogue with communities and builds, basing on this collective brainstorming, artistic and architectural installations that mimic landscapes or remote architectures through the use local materials.
In Milan with the collaboration of Spazio O ‘and Macao we worked with a group of 8 local artists. Referring to the nearby Piazza Salgari, located in a neighborhood formerly inhabited by the Italian middle class and currently by a multitude of migrants from different parts of the world, we conducted a collective “field work” with the intention to collect stories coming from different latitudes of the world which later came to be related around this space and published in a book. Inspired by these narratives, we created a sculptural ensemble thought of as an archipelago on wheels, with the intention of constructing a mobile monument for a travel writer who never left Italy.
