WIDE CITY, MILANO, 1998
There is a tower in Milan called "Velasca" around which the city revolves. It is twenty floors high and rises above the surrounding houses like a protective mushroom. B.B.P.R. designed it after the war and, as of today, it is the example of Milanese architecture which best represents this century.
This is why the project revolves around it or, better, a model of it which, placed at the centre of the event, arranged and enclosed everything within it. It is a map of Milan like the ones you get in the city's tourist offices, like those printed by Di Lauro (also available at the tourist office) in 23,000 copies (at least that is what they say) and distributed in the aforementioned offices. But there is an element which makes it different from the others, not a cartographic elemnent but an informational element: it contains a list of approximately 500 addresses of foreign activities in Milan, side by side with the co-ordinates which indicate their location.
These are the activities which have been, some more so, some less so, officially developped in the last fifteeen years around the tower: consulates and embassies, cultural centres, restaurants, video hire, institutes, associations, cosmetic-, record-, food- and clothing shops, community headquarters, religious temples and take-aways. Everyone can make their own individual trip, visiting these places in line with their own interests and desires.
But another trip, a more targeted one, was organised at the end of the show, on four Wednesdays in April: an introduction to the various foreign cultural centres in Milan. When we arrived there, by feet or by public transport, a representative introduced us to their activities, the reasons and the relationships they have with their own and other communities.
Anyone could enrol in the trip when they visited the show, where a "taster" was given: accompanied by a soundtrack recorded in the foreign Sunday markets and in the streets of the city, the visitors found tables with information about all the centres, printed by the centres themselves, detailing the various activities which they organise for their own communities and for others. Flyers, magazines, brochures and books for the public. Beside these, calling cards and information about the commercial activities available in the city.
Beyond the tables, through the big glass walls of the exhibition space, you could see people passing by, sometimes relaxed, sometimes neurotic, in the square below, the Cathedral square. A tableau vivant, a live urban landscape, moments of daily life observed through a transparent screen on which nothing is projected and which projects and immediate reality.
When you turned around, you could see dozens of postcard-sized photographic images on the brick walls as uncertain visual notes taken during walks made when the show was being planned. Places and faces of a quite unofficial Milan, put between portraits of the tower around which everthing revolves.
(Luca Vitone, Wide City, catalogue, Progetto Giovani, Milan 1999)