Marco Merati: Bovisa o del nessun luogo

The project was born to telling the story of the change in a neighborhood of Milan which for over a century has represented one of the most important production center in Italy.

A unique city landscape, in continuous transformation. A territory suspended between memory and redemption, poised between past and future, where time seems to flow in a circular way. A place dotted with non-places.

Fixing the transformations of an urban ecosystem through photographic research of places and symbols that we frequent and consume daily without however grasping their social essence and historical value.

A journey into everyday life, in a labyrinth of warehouses, fences, grandiose artefacts of industrial archeology that border modern architecture and silent warehouses; new emerging centralities and old declining centralities, innovation laboratories and industrial projects, modern infrastructures and disused railway yards, residential neighborhoods and isolated survivals of social housing mix together, often haphazardly.

An urban fabric where very often the form no longer corresponds to the content. Universities were built inside factories, people live in laboratories, design and exhibit in warehouses.

A visual narrative to rediscover the past and observe a heterogeneous and composite present where, recently, creative studios, designers, art galleries and laboratories are bringing new lifeblood, but where, at the same time, new building’s speculation put their interests.

This work does not propose any solution. The photographic language remains a language that asks questions. It tells and informs: it tells the story of a teeming suburb which in little more than a century has gone from being a focal point of city life and production to being a mass of empty and anonymous buildings, forgotten in the ferocious process of modernization of the 80s and 90s of the last century.