AFFITTASI LUMINOSISSIMO BILOCALE

AFFITTASI LUMINOSISSIMO BILOCALE is the site-specific exhibition by Zeroscena and Silvia Francis Berry within suMISURA, the exhibition season where selected artists analyze spazioSERRA, both content and container, where the same rules that constitute it are emphasized, exploited, deformed, reshaped, and sometimes nullified on a daily basis. The exhibition is visible from Thursday, February 15th until Friday, March 22nd, 2024, at Milan’s Lancetti railway station.
 

The Zeroscena collective employs different media to investigate the expressive and relational possibilities of play, language, and archival memory, interacting with the territory in which they operate. Along with Berry, who instead makes drawing the main expressive medium of her research, they have dealt with the relationship between the territory and its inhabitants.
 

Starting from the personal experience of the artists, who lived as students in Milan and Venice, the exhibition AFFITTASI LUMINOSISSIMO BILOCALE brings a topic of public interest to a public place: the housing emergency that affects several Italian cities, creating social discomfort especially among students and precarious workers. The project aims to highlight and denounce the neurosis of the real estate sector by setting up a fictitious apartment inside spazioSERRA, where the furniture is made of cardboard or recycled materials, and the walls are reduced to a floor plan drawn on the floor.

A series of announcements published on the main real estate portals anticipates and accompanies the exhibition. Inside spazioSERRA, a custom-made "bright two-room apartment" is set up, equipped with beds (too many), kitchen, and even a bathroom with a WC and shower. As often happens in rented houses, the furniture is repurposed, coming from the homes or cellars of friends and family, or from ads of private citizens giving away pieces of furniture, just to get rid of them. At the end of the exhibition, the furniture will be returned or given away again for free. Alice Nagini and Laura Raccanelli write in the reflection accompanying the exhibition: "The set of exposed elements configures a system of objects in transit: temporary shapes, traces of an inconsistent structure, waste converted into resources. Each of them carries the narrative of those who experienced it, but it is in the dimension of movement and relocation that they formulate a new joint declaration. Becoming other than themselves, things redefine the meaning of domestic space, which from stable and protective becomes an emblem of compromise and necessary adaptation."
 

We are facing a widespread housing emergency, the impacts of which are particularly evident in cities like Milan, which attract students and workers from all over Italy and abroad. There is a widespread commercialization of housing with disproportionate dimensions, too small compared to the cost and excessively burdensome compared to the average income. Students, young people, and precarious workers suffer the consequences of a system that increasingly considers a home not as a fundamental right but rather as a privilege to be earned. "The installation, with its recovered furnishings, is then dis-habitual in giving concreteness to the etymological betrayal of inhabiting [from Latin habitare, properly «to hold», frequent of habere «to have»], it tells of a mobility imposed by housing precariousness and at the same time symbolically declares the prohibition of settling."

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EVENTS

17/02 at 15:30 @ spazioSERRA | AnthroDay Milano - The meeting proposes a dialogue between art, anthropology, and housing issues, with an in-depth analysis by urban anthropologist Laura Raccanelli and literary studies doctoral candidate Alice Nagini, and the participation of Ilaria Lamera (Tende in Piazza), Noemi Mariani (@mangiapregasbatty), and Valentina Rizzi, IUAV doctoral candidate: the themes of living and the agency of objects in defining domestic space will be addressed. Free admission event upon registration.
 

22/03 at 19:00 @ spazioSERRA | Pick Up Party - On the occasion of the exhibition's finissage, the space will be opened and the used furniture can be picked up by anyone interested in using them to furnish their home, saving them from the oblivion of a cellar or a landfill.