WORKING CLASS
We started working on these series of images in the middle of 2004, when the effects of the entrance of the Chinese Popular Republic into the WTO started to be felt by the European Industrial structure. Many enterprises, some of which had already been moved from urban areas to those in the hinterland in the second post-war period, started to de-localise their productive unities in the Chinese territory: it was immediately clear that enormous upheavals would take place in the European productive and commercial structure. Here in Italy, in particular, the textile productive area lived moments of deep crisis, a recession then extended to other industrial sectors, so much that today it has become a sad and daily use to getting to know about the failing of one of many industries and about the consequent dismissing of its workers. All of this while in China thousands of new industries are continually established with European capitals; a situation in which the Chinese workers are underpaid, labour is exploited and working conditions are unacceptable. It is very hard to anticipate the social and economic consequences to which this situation will lead in the long term, especially now that a deep economic crisis adds itself to this situation and has been hitting the economy of the whole world since Autumn 2008.
We just know that we started to explore the abandoned industrial areas of Milano and its hinterland, attracted as magnets, maybe because we have the clear feeling that these places somehow reflect the future of our current industrial structures, scary omens of what will inevitably have to happen to many other factories, active today, much more frequently than in the past.
Regarding the city of Milano, all images have been realised inside the sheds of the enormous abandoned industrial area of the ex Innse, in Rubattino, an area subjected today to an important intervention of requalification.
Regarding the hinterland, instead, we mainly focused on the ex-textile factories along the Lambro river, up to the suburbs around Monza and the first districts of Brianza, sometimes even getting to the area around Saronno.
Today, just as during the days when we realised these images, a belief appears strongly to us: that here, among these abandoned places, a common fate is hidden, that these places are pervaded by common destinies reflecting each other and reminding us to choose our future carefully, now, while it’s still possible.
