1992 "Sindone", Galleria Giorgio Persano, Turin

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.

1992 "Collection", Photography Biennial, Centre d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona

I never thought of myself as a photographer, but when i got invited to take part in this photography biennial, I found the opportunity, unexpected and challenging, to reflect upon the traditional function of photography, not only its power to record, reproduce, and become an object in its own right, but also the relationship between photography and death, its capability of capturing, freezing a thing or person in a moment in time, lifting it from its becoming, making it still and immobile like death.

I certainly wasn’t the first person to associate photography and death, Roland Barthes describes photographers as "agents of Death", but closer to me was Christian Boltanski’s work, which I knew would be exhibited in the same show. That’s when I decided to engage in a dialogue with him. He is haunted by the problems of death, memory and loss; he often seeks to memorialize the anonymous and those who have disappeared.

So, rather than taking more photographs I decided to cut up hundreds of pictures I took in the past (dissecting the already dead !) and then distributed these cut-outs - mouths, eyes, ears, hands and noses - into five glass jars, one for each organ of the senses.

The spooky thing is that Cindy Sherman also chose to show pictures of body fragments in the same occasion. Although death wasn’t the theme of the biennial, the number of works dealing with it created an accidental leit motif unforeseen by the curator.

1991 "Wait For The Waitress" , Studio Guenzani, Milan.

For my first one-person show, which was also my first show in a commercial gallery, i divided the gallery space into two distinct areas: one, which included the gallerist’s office and the reception, was turned into a film set, although nobody was actually filming. The other, larger, exhibition area became a projection room.

I asked the gallery owner, Claudio Guenzani, to play the gallerist role, and placed 500-Watt quartz film lights in his office. By walking into his office critics and collectors found themselves under the same bright spotlights and became slightly self-conscious, as they suspected somebody might start filming them. Wearing a waitress uniform I stood behind the bar I set up in the reception area and served drinks throughout the opening. There was no indication that it was a performance; as this was my first appearance in the Milanese art scene, my identity could be easily disguised.

The exhibition room on the other hand was darkened with thick black curtains and one of the walls served as a screen for a floor-to-ceiling projection. It showed a picture I had taken at the opening of the American Pavillion during the 1990 Venice Biennial: a waiter and a waitress serving drinks. They were both Afro-Americans, a disturbing reinforcement of a racial stereotype. Those who walked into this room became part of the projection, no longer just innocent viewers, they found themselves cast into the role of white middle-class guests attended to by black waiters.

The soundtrack consisted of unauthorized recordings of all the openings I had attended during the previous year. Past comments and voices blended with present ones. Past openings became the object of the exhibition people had been invited to, creating a surreal loop of disjointed time. This show paid homage to Bertolt Brecht’s theatre theory, the Verfremdung Effekt in particular, and to Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose screenplay, Last Year in Marienbad, was on my bedside table at the time when I started thinking about my solo show at Studio Guenzani.