surveillance - cameras

The eyes of the city




The artandgallery association contributes to Number Zero of ”inContemporanea, the art network”, a project of the Province of Milan aimed at giving visibility to Milan’s rich contemporary art scene and raising awareness of it among citizens.

Meris Angioletti & Boris I Marina Ballo Charmet I Alessandro Cimmino I Moreno Gentili I Francesco Jodice Sejla Kameric I Multiplicity.lab I Antonella Ortelli I Arend Roelink I Angelo Sarleti I Anne Zeitz.

The eyes of the city – the collection put together by Manuela Gandini, which opens at artandgallery on Tuesday 21 March from 7pm to 11pm in the context of the In Contemporanea initiatives organised by the Province of Milan – reconstructs the climate of electronic surveillance by video cameras which, through their automated spying, reproduce fragmentary and emotionless versions of reality.

Three people meet surreptitiously under a bridge. A homeless man falls to the ground. Some children skip. Excerpts of images stolen from the omnipresent Orwellian urban video cameras that “protect” us from theft, attacks, violations, violence and muggings (without actually stopping them), images given back to us by artists reflecting on the new horizons of vision.

By capturing the camera’s vague and indifferent focus, Alessandro Cimmino, Anne Zeitz, Angelo Sarleti, Sejla Kameric and Arend Roelink work on the effects of surveillance and the obsession with duplicating reality, creating a blurred yet vivid mosaic of society.

While Arend Roelink covers video cameras placed near banks with bin liners, Francesco Jodice, whose intentions are far removed from global surveillance, proposes a series of voluntary tails, tracing human and architectural micro-landscapes to reveal varying lifestyles between one metropolis and another.

The eyes of the city also offers glimpses of the invisibility of the margins:

in Marina Ballo Charmet’s video, Viale Papiniano is filmed from ground level shortly after the market finishes and captures people arriving to gather the fruit and other objects left lying about;

in Antonella Ortelli‘s film, the physicality of a San Vittore inmate manifests itself as she painfully regains a creative dimension, tracing the confines of her own body in the micro-living space of the prison. In the new metropolitan landscape,

Moreno Gentili marks off entire urban areas with the yellow tape commonly used for emergencies - “do not cross” – highlighting the limits and contradictions inherent in managing public space in a context of permanent threat.

Meris Angioletti & Boris, in their video, stroll with two persecuted writers from Cuba and Vietnam, Pedro Ruiz and Linh Dinh, while they talk non-stop about Italian cities.

Multiplicity.lab offers a territorial reconnaissance of Milan, surveying the areas of new poverty and urban development, and replacing the abstract study of maps with collective interdisciplinary living experience.
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