My entry for Tapirulan’s contest 2017 is an unsettling but heartfelt one, as I think personal projects should be.
The contest’s given theme was “Ciao”, the most popular form of italian greeting, but I wanted to avoid this obvious and to me somehow bland meaning so i went for another path.
The “Ciao” scooter named like the greeting to brand it informally to target a younger audience, became the most popular drive for italian youth between the ’70s and the ’80s; in the same time and for the same youth also heroin had its boom, remarking one of the darkest times for the country. So, for a tragic statistic, the ride was pretty common among the young italian addicts and somehow marked an aesthetic, at least in my hometown Rome.
I grew up in the roman eastern outskirts in the early ’80s and witnessed scenes like this almost on a daily base (actually i played hide-and-seek in the Villa Chigi of the title).With the chance of the contest, subverting its topic, I wanted to fix that tragic memory on paper, without any irony or celebration. I’m not very keen into representing reality so graphically but when I do it i do it full speed ahead.
