Luoghi inattesi
We immagine student residences to be full of life. Instead, the anonymity, apathy and the inhospitable hits us as we enter the Leibniz.
This work was born out of a collaboration with the Politecnico University in Milan in order to realise a photographic project on the theme of student residences which, in turn, had to be inserted in one of their publications. Through the University, I got in contact with a student who lived at the Leibniz residence the place in which this work, "Unexpected Places", was realised.
I presented the piece to the Politecnico and as a response to it I was told that I needed to "revise it", "make it lighter "and take more photos of a "less devastated" student residence. I decided not to modify it and the work was rejected.
You can find the residence in Milan, in Via Monneret de Villard just off Via Rombon before the River Lambro and the Highway to the East of the city. From the realisation of this project, [makes no sense] the management belongs to the Cariplo Foundation, that also provides reception and cleaning services, whilst it being the University's duty to assign the rooms, occupied by a hundred students. These are mainly male foreigners, enrolled at or in an Erasmus program at the Politecnico.
When you enter Leibniz, the anonymity, the apathy and the inhospitable hits you. It feels like being in a waiting room, one that is not particularly well maintained or used, exploited by passers-by who, one after the other, come and go. The only place in which you can find traces of personal spaces are the rooms, that nonetheless, are so limited in size it makes it difficult to do any other activity other than sleep in them. A strong neglect by the management is transpired everywhere, and it's inevitably reflected upon the people that live there, provoking in them a sense of disaffection and disinterest in taking care of their personal space.
I tried to transfer these sensations and feelings to my photographs by mainly using black and white with a visible grana, almost dirty and I chose the form of the "dittico" to pull in the pictures of the places and those people who lived in them. As well as in the case of reality there's an instinct to survive the lack of hospitality by avoiding the place, the style I adopted reflects this unease which is underlined by the forced unity of the two images.
Before starting this project I had always imagined student residences to be places full of life and confusion. On the contrary, I found a state of neglect and people who were resistant to the idea of being associated with the place, even in a photograph. Disappointment expressed with sharp colours, de-contextualised, with nowhere else to turn. A Polaroid-like layout, the perfect snapshot, wants to highlight the transient relationship between space and people.
The residence was emptied out like it is every year for the summer break in July 2010.
In September it didn't re-open.
