The photographs and videos (Marossi, Jodice, Di Bello) that make up the collection stem from commissions given to eight artists in 2000, on the occasion of the first of such projects carried out during the preparatory phase of the creation of the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea. The exhibition that presented the resulting works was staged in the central block of Villa Ghirlanda in the fall-winter of 2002-03, with a catalogue edited by Roberta Valtorta containing texts by Eleonora Fiorani and Gustavo Pietropolli Charmet and published by Silvana Editoriale.
The project followed those of Archivio dello spazio (1987-97) and Milano senza confini (1998-99), promoted by the Province of Milan, and was intended to render the scope of work produced on commission even more elastic, shifting the attention away from a documentary utilization of the medium and placing the accent instead on the value of an autonomous artistic project that found in the commission an opportunity for its realization. Thus the eight young photographers involved set out to investigate the very concept of metropolis, approaching it in the broadest sense possible: as a physical and therefore historical, urbanistic and social location and as a theoretical, conceptual, existential, psychological and virtual place.
The works realized cannot be assigned to traditional areas of camera work like the landscape, the portrait and classical social photography. They do not have a documentary character and they do not use traditional techniques and forms of presentation. The artists worked in a critical and extremely thoughtful way on the urban environment, showing particular interest in the human figure, observed both in the public spaces of the metropolis and in more intimate and private settings, while urban space as such seem to have played a more marginal role, serving as a backdrop to the telling of human stories.
Joint ownership of Milan Metropolitan Area and Municipality of Cinisello Balsamo, entrusted to the Museum of Contemporary Photography
Contents 66 chromogenic prints, transparencies, video DVD
Dating of works 1997-2002
Authors Ezio Colanzi, Paola Di Bello, Francesco Jodice, Tancredi Mangano, Roberto Marossi, Roberta Orio,Marco Signorini, Cristina Zamagni
Link (in Italian) the Idea di Metropoli Fund in the collections search engine
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