MENATWORK is an exhibition on work, on the silence of work and on its fatigue.
It talks about sweat, heat and cold, about earth and sky, about charred lines and taut muscles.
MENATWORK is an exhibition of photographs. It tells the story of an iPhone and the world that one can observe from its small screen. Photos of shoes, hands, backs, toil and sweat. Each photograph is a moment of silence, often of movement, depicting work in its diverse forms. Taken without posing, without direction, each photo has a story to tell. Some shots are stolen, capturing in this simple way, a moment of another’s life.
Marco Puzzo, architect and designer, is the artist of the photographs and tells this story.
MENATWORK is an exhibition of sculpture. Different metal objects take form and appear in the center of the room. Made of steel, a material that is inevitably part of work, part of the fatigue necessary to sustain its weight. The sculptures talk of the fatigue needed to model the material, that is born and is transformed as a result of man’s will. The process is described, the metamorphosis is completed. The material, first in its raw form, is refined, gives way to the force and is molded, becoming shiny, light. And man understands that his ambitions are accomplished in this metamorphosis.
Luigi Tirino, artist and craftsman, creates the sculptures and tells another story.
MENATWORK is also noise. The noise that accompanies work, of which it is a soundtrack. Those who visit the exhibition are greeted with the noise of machinery, the acute sound of tools, of hammers against walls, of scalpels and of stones. Visitors are met by the music of toil, of sweat. Marco and Luigi, both being musicians who know how to speak with sound and noise, go to factories and work sites, streets and markets, to steal the voices of work, to mix them, edit and enrich them to then re-propose them, telling in this way a new story.
MENATWORK is hope. It does not describe and exhibit solely the work that exists, real work, that is lived: if it is true that Italy is founded on work and its Constitution ratifies and makes work the foundation for the whole population, it is necessary to take this fundamental concept, sew it, water it and make it re-bud like a lawn that renews itself in the warm weather, like a field of multicolored flowers that can be gathered and taken home to decorate the corners and tables of our daily life. Open flowers are slender elements made of steel, with a solid base, a stem and a letter/flower. They are not so few, but at the same time not so many. There are 48, as are the letters that comprise the first part of the 1st article of our Constitution, that puts work as the foundation of our country. A garden, a field of flowers: small totems that form a whole, with a very high symbolic value that goes beyond the sum of the single parts. Each flower is a unique piece, linked to the event and as such is a piece of art work with a well-defined meaning, that possesses an identity card that identifies it as a single/part/of/a/whole that it carries with it, if chosen by a visitor that takes it away. The 48 flowers, symbol of work and through it man’s achievement, will the separated at the end of the exhibition and will flower again in 48 different places, carrying a message of hope and redemption. The garden tells the last story, the most solemn and intangible, that contains in its womb the bud of all the others.
