In your face

In the Seventies, in a New York pressed by a social war created by the closure of factories and by the increase of unemployment, the first writers started to go in the subway warehouses to paint on trains, quickly leaving their names to avoid to be arrested by the police. At first the public opinion evaluated that as an act of defacement of public spaces, but for them was just the funniest and most exciting thing to do. Shortly after this phenomenon become established in all the metropolitan cities in America and Europe. For almost half century, thousands of impulsive kids repeated these actions all over the world, while the law was against them and the public opinion considered them vandals. But they didn’t care. The photographic exhibit In your face by Alex Fakso that we present as the first event of the Outdoor festival, follows the same concept. It’s something that cheekily is presented to us without fear and filters. Alex Fakso is an Italian photographer who lives in London, and with his work he became the voice and direct witness of this world, giving to it more intensity by his personal stile and photographic cut. In your face wants to report the writing phenomenon that has imposed in the urban collective unconscious, changing the perception of common spaces. The protagonists of Alex Fakso’s blow ups are captured during their night intrusions in the metropolitan warehouses. His enormous photographies cover entirely the walls of some of the pavillions where the Outdoor festival took place in 2015. And in some of the rooms these photos cover symbolically the objects founded in the ex Barracks, creating an expressive short circuit that overturns the ethic universe tied to the past of the structure, which plays with the legal/illegal dichotomy. The place that once contained military corps, is transformed in a challenging way by celebrating its opposite. That creates a cognitive disorientation in the spectator world values. But this exaltation is just apparent, in fact Alex Fakso’s work has always been intended to show, without any judgement, an underground world unknown to the most, with the aim to report by images the controversy of this artistic expression. What is not a simple documentary is the way the photographer chose to place his blow ups: the expressive short circuit between legality and illegality is activated by the actions shot in the pictures, and for the artist is an incitement to reflect on writers vandalistic act in opposition to the aggressive actions made by the establishment as well.

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