Public
At a certain point of our contemporary history men started to show themselves, their faces, their bodies, always in increasing and forced ways, both directly, and through the exhibition of their image. As the signs of the traditional "status" lost their meaning up to disappearing, in the society of ripe and liberal capitalism, that is defined as postmodern but also as iper-modern, the body itself has become a media through which we try to impose our own sexual and social identity. That's why the advertising manifesto, as well as its twin brother - the political manifesto -, have turned out to be very persistent, even if certainly not new, and ideal for the urban background, the main theatre of that "showcasing" process (as Vanni Codeluppi would call it) in which we are absorbed.Politics and advertising shake hands: the same faces, the same winking eyes, the same smiles, the same skin.More changeable is advertising, which easily launches in the city not just faces but scantily dressed bodies, which burst with a stereotyped health, and private poses are violently made public; more rigorous, up to now, are politics, which remain anchored to the face presented as a mask of optimism and serenity; but also the circus, cinema and art appeal to the manifesto, trying to talk to the evermoving multitudes in the urban spaces.
Giampiero Agostini has been shooting manifestos for a few years, and has now created a huge collection of bodies and faces coming from these different worlds, apparently faraway from each other but closer in facts.He mixes the two, as they are, anyway, always presences performed on the city-stage, presences aimed at exchanging goods and at showing feelings, ideas, sexuality, free time, political choices. Here and there, in the story, the form of an empty billboard, a mute rectangle which evidences itself in the urban structure, waiting for some more figures, can turn out to be a politician, an actor, a model, an athlete, ready, or better still, forced, to become public, non-existent if they don't become public.
(texy of Roberta Valtorta, Scientific Director of Fondazione Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea di Cinisello Balsamo)
