Univer City
University as a crossroads of stories, faces and people coming from all over the world, multi-ethnic meeting place between past and future.
MIrko Cecchi proposes an interesting and not predictable reading of the university world in Milan through multi-ethnic lens. University told through the faces and experiences of those people who changed country drawn by Italian excellence. This is how we meet a student from Bucarest who studies in Milan and dreams America and a job at the UN, or a young Swedish teacher from Bocconi university. Every image tells us about the subject in two situations. One in which we discover the traces of the motivation that brought him/her to Milan: a cello, a clothing model, or even only some notebooks that reveal the activity of the subject portrayed; the other one in which we find the subject isolated, portrayed in his physical being almost as if he were asking the observer to discover his/her personality, to question him/her. In fact, the work by Mirko Cecchi is not only a visual enquiry, but also a moment of reciprocal discovery and personal contact with the subjects portrayed. During the shooting the photographer asked everybody the same questions, trying to understand their characteristics as well as their expectations in relation to the experience they are living. This is how it was possible to build a double narration: on one hand the visual one, through a contemporary reportage style that shows us the protagonists of this tale, on the other hand the textual one that informs us, with synthetic captions, about their lives and about the paths that brought them to Milan.
Text by Daniele Pennati
