Galleria Nazionale 2017/2018

A few years ago there was a small accident in the

balance, a dialectical relation with its own

I am putting back together some of the

of a real work, but the invention of a possible

photographic archive of the Galleria Nazionale: a

History. In this spirit the accident, and the

experience of those months, trying to

one. For some months I had already been

shelf drawer gave way and some glass plates -

keeping of its memory, became the main subject

understand how my museum is recomposed, how

photographing at the Galleria Nazionale,

13x18cm negatives, documentation photographs of

of my research. Following that path, I

far the single fragments give back an image,

concentrating on the less public sides of the

the collection - broke. I tried to put a few

photographed the newspaper headlines held in

a document, a speculation of the Galleria.

museum, on the structures that have allowed it to

pieces back together, but I soon gave up: the

the bio-iconographic archive that told of the

What follows are images that try to give

last and to function, that have let the museum

fragments were hard to find, and it was far more

theft and the later recovery of three paintings

back the path taken towards the five works

put forward and preserve the expressions of its

interesting to reassemble them in a

stolen from the Galleria in the nineties, and a

that came out of the residency at the

own time, accumulate them, offer new ways of

non-“philological” way, to use that material to

shoot-out from a Hollywood film shot in the

Galleria Nazionale between 2017 and 2018.

seeing. Like a body continually disturbed, yet

invent documents that were no longer the referents

museum's rooms a few years ago. Today

able to change and to find each time a different

The first work I did was on the exhibition

rooms using different sources of light I

photographed the museum for a couple of weeks

I tried to keep the same attitude

towards light in the spaces meant

for the conservation of the works

Working this way I found what are the

first two works that make up the project.

They are two plastic wrappings used to

store two works in the installations

depot of the Galleria Nazionale. What

interested me in these first results was

their capacity to relate visually to some

of the works kept and shown in the

museum. This is an aspect that becomes a

substantial part of the research.

144x180cm

inkjet print

I work in the museum depots for about a month. There

I come into contact with a number of people who look

after the conservation of the works, both physical

and documentary. From there the idea of extending

the research to the archives of the Galleria

The research on light goes on. I try to

light the materials kept in the archive

with different techniques, trying to reveal

the subjective nature of the document

Inside the photographic and bio-iconographic

archive I find very different materials. The

history of the gallery takes shape, and the

documentation of the exhibitions and of the

works often mixes with matters of maintenance,

of the works as much as of the rooms. Things

break, mistakes are made, accidents happen.

This is a broken glass plate. In the

photographic archive I found two boxes full of

these plates. From those two boxes the accident

becomes central to my thinking about the museum

The first works on these plates are recompositions

After a couple of weeks of this kind of research,

which takes the result of my work far away from

the work documented by the plate, almost out of

boredom and frustration a game begins with the

smallest and least meaningful glass fragments

I try to remake the footprint of the

original plate with these small pieces

By chance I knock against the light box

they were resting on and the order breaks

I keep knocking

Out of this accident comes the

second work of the project

The final work is made of

1025 inkjet prints 20x25cm

In the photographic archive I also find this

image. It is a scene from a film. At first I

think the film was shot at the gallery, and

that the reason it looks different to me is the

addition of a set. In fact it is the British

School a short distance away. Still, I start

looking for films shot in the gallery's rooms.

One evening, watching television at my parents'

house, I see John Wick 2. Several sequences are

shot in the gallery. I concentrate at once on

one where Keanu Reeves, the film's protagonist,

kills some twenty people in the course of the

shoot-out. An accident of fiction this time. In

the background are the red and blue walls, as

they were before the last rehang of 2016

The first attempts at working on the

sequence centre on the figures shot down

one after another inside the gallery and

on the works damaged by the gunfire

Then the attention shifts to the

shots and to the colour of the walls.

This image shows the 1:1 of the print as

seen in the room. The photographs were taken

with a macro photography technique from a

led screen. The single works of this third

part are lightboxes 80x100cm. The final work

is made of two walls, one red and one blue,

each composed of 16 photographs

The last part of the work concentrates on the

bio-iconographic archive and in particular on a

file gathering all the newspaper cuttings

collected by the archivists of the Galleria

Nazionale about a robbery that took place in the

museum in the nineties. This part is set out as a

narrative and tries to reconstruct what happened

through macro photographs of two illustrations

made by La Repubblica and Il Messaggero

The final work is made of 20 carpets

(print on moquette) 200x160cm