Ritratti senza nome (Portraits without names)
C-Print on photo paper (on aluminium support)
54 cm x 80 cm
2007-2008
Series “Ritratti senza nome” is a work on people that are found dead in Milan and the surroundings of the city. The Labanof laboratorium-morgue was founded in 1995 in Milano with the aim to find out the identity of unidentified human bodies found in the area of the City. Labanof was grounded because the quantity of unidentified bodies in the area has grown exponentially in the recent years.
Often the people found dead in the surroundings of European and North-American big cities are people that came there from outside these areas hoping for a better future. The people that go over the boarders and stay permanently in the new country is increasing in all Western countries. Often these people can live years and decades or even their whole life without a permission to stay and work in their new home country. They remain outside the official system living without any right to social care, without the right to basic services such as healthcare and pension.
I wanted to make visible this ever growing group of dead people of our time. The portraits are like ghosts hardly visible from the white background. Even in their death these people exist and don’t exist in the same time. The portraits tell about life and death in the contemporary cities. These invisible people remain unknown in their death but that is the moment when they start to exist for the system, because their bodies are like problematic waste that have to be treated in a special way. In that moment the questions like who should take responsability becomes actual? The city? The government? The society in general?
