Stretched Out Flags

Roghudi Vecchia, Italy. The project looks at travel, or rather the escape from the South of Italy, both as a form
of surrender and as a dream and a utopia of return.
A theme that is at once personal and universal. As part of this scenario, the image
of the clothes hanging in the sunshine becomes a snapshot, a symbol of the south,
of freedom, conviviality and naturalness, an image that harks back to the designer’s own
memories and recollections. The flag is deconstructed in this project: no longer
an archetype or an icon of a flag to be waved, but rather the flag itself, hanging, and thus
signifying surrender. A wooden pole and a large sheet tied to it form the white flag.
The object offered in place of the flag is a photograph of Roghudi, a sort of ghost town
on the southern slopes of the Aspromonte in Calabria. Roghudi lost all its inhabitants
in the Seventies when they first scattered and then found home in Roghudi Nuova.
The photograph shows an art operation carried out among the houses in Roghudi
Vecchia: a number of white sheets are hoisted as a metaphor for a utopian, imaginative
repopulation of the South. The utopia is that of a return as a reaction to surrender
and to emigration.