/ PRESENTATION
FURYO
to excavate and protect
STEFANO SERRETTA
Text by Andrea Tinterri
The title alone would suffice to encapsulate the entire exhibition process, that acronym that links utopia and failure, portraying a generation that begins to come to terms with its past and the debris left behind. Born in 1987, STEFANO SERRETTA excavates and protects, two complementary actions essential for preserving the memory of a recent past, a political and cultural testimony that crashed against the threshold of utopia.
The autobiographical element serves as the narrative voice; SERRETTA reconstructs a universe of people, events, objects, and phantoms that have shaped the Italian political scene, and beyond, from the late 1990s to the G8 in Genoa, the culmination of illusion.
FURYO is not just an acronym, but the artist’s alter ego, a witness to a collective process that has now run aground, necessitating a cold-blooded reflection. The private/collective boundary, on which the entire work floats, is formalized in the internal/external dichotomy that characterizes the exhibition project. SERRETTA partially conceals some of the windows and the entrance to the gallery with rough wooden planks on which the phrase “The sand knows what the rock does not” stands out. This is a way to hide and protect, at least partially, the installation within the room. The palisade marks both an expectation and, at the same time, a trauma, a failure that the interior will unveil in its deflagration.
It is the phrase that reaffirms the function of Time, that sedimentation that transforms rock into sand, necessary to cultivate a real awareness of events and a historical distance that liberates memory from useless nostalgic sentimentalism.
What remains of that experience, of that political momentum spent between social centers and urban graffiti, of that movement that in Genoa in 2001 showcased the merits and limits of collective mobilization?
SERRETTA’s biography elevates to a generational narrative starting from the world of graffiti, evoked by the very inscription, which he has been part of since 2003, particularly in the abandoned factory spaces of the former industrial triangle.
His practice has never bowed to legal commissions, remaining faithful to an indispensable clandestinity of the act.
The palisade is a boundary, a watershed between what has happened and what could have happened, between the inside and the outside, two contiguous yet independent territories.
The internal installation features a marble flooring on which SERRETTA inscribes his generational cosmology.
As the artist himself writes “it is a snapshot as open as possible, and hopefully contradictory, of what it was like to grow up among the CDs of 99 Posse, the newspapers of Lotta Comunista, the rap of Pac and Biggie, Lord Bean and Fabri Fibra, Nirvana, Stallone’s action movies, graffiti, Star Wars films, the arrival of The Lord of the Rings, the onset of mainstream pornography, and then raves”.
These references, with their contradictions, reflect a generation that is no longer strictly militant but permeable to cultural interferences from seemingly discordant scenarios. It is a narrative carved into marble from which a dusting of rock rises, once assaulted by illusion, awaiting the crash. As every utopia knows its own failure, but every defeat exhibits peculiar characteristics that are not interchangeable with previous ones.
The walls of the gallery remain devoid of any iconographic reference; the entire installation settles on the ground, with the flooring taking on the form of a diary that the public can traverse.
The horizontal positioning is a direct consequence of the failure that FURYO embodies; nothing is anchored to the walls anymore, and every memory descends, scratching and carving into the marble. Fragments of an archaeology to be preserved at all costs, waiting for a reassembly.
Since Utopia contains also its own collapse, and caring for the remaining ruins is an act of compassion and understanding, it is above all a renewed activism.