MenAtWindows revives and dwells in a forgotten, lifeless urban space through a collective performance that turns not only by a photographic-click but in a truly lived artistic experience. . The abandoned buildings temporally fill up with significance by means of addition and subtraction. It is an instant work of art: the protagonists of the performance are the men in red; they repopulate the building for a moment, occupying empty and colourless spaces like a vital lymph that restarts to circulate inside the buildings.
The purpose of the artist is to take possession once again of deserted places, metropolitan reality left without purpose where art’s goal is to fill and revitalize the emptiness. The building’s identity never changes it just transforms itself when a hundred people flow into the empty space that becomes art for a brief moment of the click. Everything inevitably is destined to return like before, motionless and deserted. The click is the only evidence of this artwork, like a sudden passage of life and meaning.
The figures covered in red are a precise decision of the author to create a contrast with the grey of the scene. The red element does not have any political value or membership. On the contrary it has lived creating total uniformity among its participants to be notice in the blank spaces of the facade.
With MAW, the artist decides to give a new look at shape and architecture lasting a long time with no meaning in the city where he lives. Before the performance starts, each building has been studied and observed for a long period. To be understood in every aspect of its uniqueness and complexity: All the spaces are reinterpreted through the artist’s sensibility to exploit their personality studying the volumes composing the structure.
The choice of the shot, the position of the figures along the building lines, the setting of empty and full spaces, the choice of hour to stop the moment, all these elements come from the precise decisions of the artist before the performance. There are other unforeseeable and casual factors defining the performance (the light of the selected day the quantity of participants, the weather etc. etc. This is what makes the fixed instant of the click unique.
MenAtWindows#Quarto
Quarto Oggiaro · june 14th, 2008 · lambda®print · 310x125 cm
MenAtWindows#Quarto has been one of the events promoted by the Provincia di Milano in occasion of the Metrocult 2008 initiative, concerned with the role of the urban architecture in the social relations. One of the main topic was related to the urban periphery. In order to add something to the simple use of words, the Provincia chose to call Marco Pieri to create an artistic moment of fracture in Piazzetta Capuana, in the neighborhood of Quarto Oggiaro, one of the most evident example of urban architectural decay, and social decay as well, in the periphery of Milan.
Unlike the previous buildings chosen by the artist, Piazzetta Capuana is nowadays inhabited. The neglect it has been subjected to is not due to the absence of people, but to the slow and gradual abandon of the social spaces by the residents: Piazzetta Capuana is in fact an enclosed square, accessible from only one side. The shops had closed, and people prefer not to hang out there. The aim of the artistic performance was to create a momentary interruption of the social abandon of this place: for a day, or maybe for only a few hours, Piazzetta Capuana has been the “fulcrum” of the neighborhood, being filled up with people. The dominant grey of the square has been fully colored thanks to the presence of volunteers who came to take part in the performance, with the typical approach of MenAtWindows.
