Spazio Libero 

Spazio Libero is a project that had the purpose to document the vacuum generated by the lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic especially in the physical spaces of urban mass communication, showing the blank billboards in the streets of the city of Milan that modify the perception of the urban landscape evoking scenarios of economic and social crisis.
Winning project of REFOCUS call for entriees promoted by MIBACT in collaboration with MUFOCO and TRIENNALE Milano. Exhibition held in 2021.

Milan, 15.04.2020, 10:50 AM.
Italy has been in lockdown for a few weeks now. I wander through the streets of Milan, empty and silent. At the end of my street, I notice a sportswear shop. Strange, it has always been there, yet I had never really looked at it.
I am searching for a subject to photograph. That’s what we photographers do, right?
Today, April 15, 2020, what will I choose to capture?
The city feels desolate. Very few people are walking through the streets, a few cars can be heard in the distance. I keep walking until I find myself in front of an “empty space.” What was displayed here before?
There must have been an advertisement, a text, perhaps an image. I had never looked at it, how strange. I will photograph these absent presences.

The project Spazio Libero presents a series of photographs taken in the streets of a ghost like Milan. The images show advertising spaces that now appear empty, white and silent, no image, no slogan, no presence, only a striking absence.
The main aim of the work is to show the urban landscape of Milan from an analytical perspective, drawing attention to certain “objects” to which we have become so accustomed that we no longer notice their existence. The project, however, becomes a pretext for a broader reflection.
Bombarded by an ever-increasing flow of images, we lose awareness of what surrounds us.
The true focus of this reflection is not the bare billboards scattered across the city, but all those presences around us that have, over time, become so absent.
The lockdown confronted us with a deep reflection and naturally led us to reconsider the way we see, inviting us to look and truly observe more closely.

Milan, 2020