The present is a seemingly elusive place made up of impromptu opportunities that are not always easy to grasp, often remaining incomprehensible or relegated to visual habits: we find ourselves consuming without verifying. Much of the landscape we are part of crystallises within our sedentary days and actions, becoming the only vision, the only possible form of contact with the surrounding reality. This way of living by accepting what is given becomes a particular way of understanding the passage through the places and forms that they have offered us for years, immutable, unchanging: an unconscious photograph. In contrast to this, unusual events occur that radically change and modify portions of our inner and outer landscapes, reactions to the state of affairs, to one’s individual, cultural and even social status. Change can take place through demolition, which, when organised and planned, represents an immediate and sudden solution to a construction that ranges from the meaning to the physical and material structure of the things that surround our habitual movement. When Loredana Longo learned last August that three building skeletons were to be demolished on 4 September in Modica in the Treppiedi Nord area, the work of an extreme artist like her became a unique opportunity to add another piece to her “aesthetics of destruction”, which, from the explosions of bourgeois environments in the 1960s and home interiors reconstructed to remember and then eliminate the memory, to a rare event such as the structural demolition of IACP concrete buildings that had been standing for about thirty years and symbolised the reckless construction boom of the 1970s, which left behind monsters and nightmares caused by progress and speculation on the basic needs of large sections of the Italian population, mainly in the south, which was growing socially and demographically during those years.
DEMOLITION#1 squatter depicts grey, unfinished buildings and the people who temporarily find shelter there by “squatting” and occupying a space on the edge of danger and precariousness, before everything is razed to the ground forever. Loredana Longo unifies destruction with the end of a moment of serenity for those who, ideally, have found a substandard roof under which to be a person, under which to perform gestures that only a home can allow, beyond the lack of those comfortable objects and structures that now make up our daily lives. The squatter brings recycled objects and adapts to what society allows him, from the perimeter of a disused building, ironically intended for “the people”, to discarded furnishings, but for immediate emergency use. The floor of the concrete ruin is coloured with curtains, tables, bookcases and basic utensils. From the grey, the colour of a mix of needs, confusion and lost opportunities overflows before it all ends, because stability is a luxury, a utopia.
Longo’s work goes deep and does not spare those human and political spheres that sometimes seem to play with the lives of others, heedless of the unhappiness they cause and the lives they marginalise for the sake of elitist interests that truly benefit very few people. Destruction occurs in a matter of seconds, the cloud of dust is thick. The artist from Catania has arrived at a point in her career that marks an indelible milestone, because this time every step has been taken with a tenacity that stops at nothing, that is not afraid to dare to show everything that goes unnoticed every moment without creating the indignation that would be the right trigger for a revolution.
