CURATOR/S: ROBERTO DULIO

The photography installation End. Word From The Margins New York City (2019), the video screening The Rest of the Images (2020), the sound installation Five Walks. New York City (with Tommaso Zerbini, 2021) and the illustrated maps by the landscape architect Francesca Benedetto are put on display here, dialoguing in the new exhibition spaces of the Politecnico di Milano. They represent a further stage on a journey which began at the Graduate School of Design GSD in Harvard (November 2019) and at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea GAMeC in Bergamo (February 2020) on the occasion of the publication of The Sound of the Woodpecker Bill: New York City (Humboldt Books, 2019).

A Kind of Eternity
“During the spring of 2016, I decided to walk along all the borders of New York City…The photographs I chose to tell the story of this walk spent a long time lying on the floor of my studio in Milan, being mixed together in the continuous reinterpretation of a distance. This exhibition not only tells the story of the edges of the city that I traced on foot between 2016 and 2018, but also the numerous periods in which I went back to Italy and thought over my journey, traipsing around the perimeter of my studio. I see the geography of places as an elastic image that may be lengthened and shortened as our mood would have it. Narrating through images is, above all, a way to imagine another possible world, and walking around the edges of New York was also a way of imagining another city”. Antonio Rovaldi

On the margins
“The boundaries of the city—in this case those of New York, but they could be those of any other urban settlement, even Milan—exalt the profound significance of this ambiguity, catalyzing various methods of representation, from urban geography to photography and sound narrative, and as in
this case, to cinema. The artistic research allows us to grasp a degree of complexity which would otherwise be difficult to narrate”. Roberto Dulio