Domenico Antonio Mancini reflects on the significant number of marble plaques placed on the buildings in the Barriera di Milano district of Turin to commemorate the partisans and civilians who died during the Resistance. He carries out an operation aimed at returning to its residents the details of a historical memory that risks being passed down only through grand narratives, in which the individuality of each fallen person tends to be absorbed until it disappears, thus stripping history of the people who were part of it. The artist chooses to focus on a particularly significant episode of the Resistance and develops a process aimed at bringing to light certain aspects of the life of Natale Costanzo, a partisan worker from Barriera di Milano who died in a clash with the fascists and Nazis who were attempting to occupy the factory where he worked, the FIAT Grandi Motori. To create his work, the artist asked several residents to lend him furniture from their homes, in order to perform interventions related to Costanzo’s life. On the underside of a chair, he inscribes a phrase taken from the testimony of one of the surviving partisans from that conflict, while on the bottom of a drawer in a table, he carves the symbol of FIAT, borrowed from the emblem still present on the gates of what remains of the Grandi Motori plant. Alongside this installation, the artist presents two frottages created by placing sheets directly onto the FIAT emblem on the factory building on Corso Vigevano, showing the research process and appropriation of traces from the past that Mancini has undertaken to make contact with the neighborhood and subjectively reinterpret its history.
Emanuele Riccomi

Project exhibited in:

Mind the Gap, curated by Emanuele Riccomi, Associazione Barriera, Turin, 2018