Greetings from L'Aquila

Since the catastrophic earthquake occurred in Abruzzo (Italy) on April 6th 2009, the historical centre of L’Aquila has been declared off limits (the so-called “red area”), and has been controlled 24 hours a day by the army. The artist succeeded in illegally entering the “red area” in order to take a full photographic documentation of the ruined city and of the buildings “frozen” by the supporting cages and structures in steel and iron, and to give evidence to the immobility of the political power and to the silence or the falsehood of the information given by mass media. 100.000 postcards has been produced from the photographs. Many of them have been sent to the persons in charge of national and international political institutions; in particular to those who attended the famous G8 held in L’Aquila in 2009. The public can take the postcards with the “greetings from L’Aquila”, fill them with new addresses, and send by putting them into the white “mail box”. All the new addresses are registered in a database and shown on a website through a special software. The website shows all the delivery addresses on a map of the world and allows further interaction. In three big display cases are the pages of a famous manual on architecture in Abruzzo, on which the artist intervened, emphasizing the linear geometries created by the new supporting cages, and insinuating a further level of analysis of the buildings.