This was my first site-specific project, and engaged in a dialogue with the aesthetics of Arte Povera. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that the gallery that hosted my show was well-known for representing Arte Povera artists in the 80s and contributed to their commercial success.
I hung eight bedsheets printed with images of FIAT car rims, on washing lines, intended to be a tribute to the disappeared ‘body’ of the working class in Turin, once home to a Fiat car plant, the biggest car plant in Italy. The protests of laid-off factory workers and their families had been violently repressed, and had become a relic of the past, their memory was actively suppressed while the city tried to reinvent herself.
In order to recover such memory I made a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of the city’s most important tourist attractions, a relic called Sindone, ‘Holy Shroud’ in Italian, a bedsheet that Catholics believed wrapped the body of Christ. The industrial history of the city was being erased while a dubious relic was promoted as a must-see attraction in Turin.
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