BRANCO
2019
La Venaria Reale, Torino


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As part of the twentieth edition of the Festival La Milanesiana, conceived and directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi - Branco was exhibited at the Raggia di Venaria Reale. Over 60 sculptures of dogs made of diverse materials and exposed in various poses occupied the 'courtyard of honour'.


Branco is an installation consisting of groups of stray dogs which live around Mediterranean cities in makeshift conditions. In order to survive they're forced into swift adaptability to new places and precarious equilibrium of survival of a group.

Following a trail of an anarchist progress, the project develops the research on ethnic, racial and linguistic difference, where compelled to life on margins of cities, an organism detached from a group replicates the unsteady conditions of a life found in port cities.

Branco is an architectural combination of poses, gestures, gazes and is modelled as a mobile group of sculptures akin to an urban periphery; anarchist, abusive, multiethnic.
The materials which the pieces are made of replicate the language of illegal constructions: concrete, iron, metallic nets and sheets, tar and lead.

Each element of the whole is named after 450 'città fantasma' scattered around the world. Each of those names is a witness to a parable of growth and decline of a place that through dynamics of aggregation and survival had managed to materialise an utopian dream of constructing a city, that would subsequently fail, leaving behind a legend of a ghost town:
Africo, Agdam, Agyra, Al Bara, Alta, Amendolea, Anadyrsk, Ani, Animas Forks, Antelope, Antuni, Apice, Arena, Arltunga, Armero, Asang, Ashio, Ashopton, Avi, Ayuttaya, etc.