Roma. Massimo Siragusa

Around Rome as celebrated by classical iconography, the city of great beauty with a monumental and somewhat decadent charm, with its iconic places envied by the whole world, there is another city. Hidden and alien to tourist flows. An area inhabited and lived by more than half of Roman citizens. A chaotic city, often abusive. With its gates, railings, walls, trees, archaeological finds, cars, which overlap and merge in an extraordinary and unique visual chaos. It is the edge. Indeed, the suburbs. Different from each other but all united by the same visual and architectural anarchy. In his work, articulated for over two years along the perimeter of the city, the artist has looked for relationships, passages, dialogues, trying to give order to the chaos of reality.

A journey to the Roman suburbs, which Massimo Siragusa (Catania, 1958) has known and studied for a long time, narrated through the careful eye of his camera: almost a documentary, with landscapes in which finds from the past and the ancient splendor of Rome coexist with the buildings of the sixties, with the streets transformed into parking lots and with illegal buildings.
Winner of four World Press Photos (2009 - 3rd Contemporary Issues Award - World Press Photo, 2008 - 2nd Arts Stories Award - World Press Photo, 1999 -1st Arts Stories Award - World PressPhoto, 1997 - 2nd Daily Life Award - World Press Photo) Massimo Siragusa has chosen as the subject for his exhibition a less recognizable Rome and, as he himself explains, a hidden Rome and foreign to tourist flows. An area inhabited and lived by more than half of Roman citizens. A chaotic city  with its gates, railings, walls, trees, archaeological finds, cars, which overlap and merge in an extraordinary and unique visual chaos. It is the edge. Indeed, the suburbs. Different from each other but all united by the same visual and architectural anarchy. In his work, articulated for over two years along the perimeter of the city, the artist has looked for relationships, passages, dialogues, trying to give order to the chaos of reality.

Giovanna Calvenzi, curator of the exhibition, underlines how the suburbs told by the artist do not need names, but follow each other, different and alike. The suburbs of Massimo Siragusa are the limit, the margins of a metropolis that can expand or implode, which especially in the decades close to the post-war era met with uncontrolled expansion, regardless of respect for historical colors or other people's spaces. Rome is recognized every now and then by the emergence of statues or capitals, "signs" that remind us that we could not be anywhere else. The atmosphere, the light, but above all the anarchy that unites - while ignoring them - history, memories, past and future projects, confirms where we are. Massimo Siragusa's Rome is a city where everything is possible and everything is impossible.
The exhibition is a selection of the works collected in the volume "Roma" published by Edizioni Postcart coming out in October 2020, which contains an unpublished screenplay by Ugo Gregoretti, texts by Marco Maria Sambo, Giovanna Calvenzi and a short story by Tommaso Giagni.