Return to Life

Poggioreale is not a ruin. Its urban structure has remained intact, with its houses, streets, squares, alleys, shops with signs that speak to the void, churches with only pews left to pray. It was declared dead by geography. A ghost town.

The earthquake of January '68 razed the identity of a town to the ground, not just its houses._Return to Life_ is the first act of the work _Ghosts of Belìce_. It was born from an urban and human archaeology where no excavation campaigns are necessary: everything is still within reach.

With a pitiful curiosity, Ezio Ferreri penetrated the most intimate part of the dead town, into the sacredness of the tomb, the shroud of the industrial boom. He did not photograph the disaster, the mourning, the emigration. He enacted a selective perception, transversal to the sense of memory: he looked only for objects.

Everyday objects, abandoned even by the nostalgia of their rightful owners, corruptible and skeletal like men. The tricycle, the D.D.T. pump, the meat grinder, the enema bulb, the box of Iversal 15 Tabletten Bayer, the bottles of Cortina 3000, a 1958 Marie Claire. A repertoire of illusions, vanity, desire for redemption, sacrifices, of the simplest and sweetest gestures of peasant families.

All these objects did not end their existence for physiological reasons, because they were unusable or obsolete. They stopped working at the same moment, in the breath of a single tremor.

Ferreri collected them, cleaned them, transferred them to a stage and presented them as brand new, in a glossy and sparkling guise. Isolated in the center of the carefully constructed composition, in the foreground like exceptional performers of a new advertising launch, attractive like stars of a haute couture show.

It is a sequence of still lifes built on the cynical paradox of fiction: the fiction of a lost beauty, of a violated integrity, of a use now impossible. A work on the method of time, which just like us selects, stratifies, crystallizes, sweetens and mummifies.

With gentle malice, Ferreri removed the bandages from the mummies. Now they dance.