From today until Sunday 14 April, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents A Friend, an imposing installation specially conceived for the two toll booths of Porta Venezia by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama (Tamale, Ghana, 1987), curated by Massimiliano Gioni. The installation is realised on the occasion of Milan Art Week, coordinated by the City of Milan, and will remain visible for the entire duration of Design Week. After his major interventions within important international contemporary art festivals - from the 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2015) to Documenta 14 (2017) in Kassel and Athens - the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi invited Mahama to create an installation on an urban scale in Milan that will entirely involve a symbolic place of the city: the crossroads of Porta Venezia, one of the six main gates of the city's city walls, which stands on the same road axis on which the gates of the same name were previously built in the Roman, Medieval and Spanish periods. For centuries, Porta Venezia was the gateway to the East for Milan, marking the boundary that delimited the urban territory from the countryside, a place that historically contributed to defining the topography of Milan and the relationship between the city and the outside world, recurring in life as much as in chronicles: from the entrance of the plague that devastated the city with the epidemic of the 17th century, through the descriptions in the pages of The Betrothedup to the multi-ethnic neighbourhoods that today are articulated around this fundamental junction. A Friend wants to trigger a reflection on the very concept of threshold, that place of passage that defines inside and outside, self and other, friend and foe. As has already happened with the numerous public works created by Ibrahim Mahama in the capitals of contemporary art in museums, libraries, government buildings, theatres and railway stations, in Milan too the artist will wrap the neoclassical caselli of Porta Venezia with jute sacks, creating a second skin that will give the two buildings a new identity, leading us to look at them no longer as mere monuments, but in the light of their historical origin and their symbolic and economic function as a place of commercial exchange. Addressing all the people who inhabit and frequent the city on a daily basis, Mahama will stage a temporary spectacle at a neuralgic junction for the city's road system that will confront Milan's past and present. In this Milanese presentation, Mahama's work also seems to relate explicitly to the urban interventions of the artist Christo, who in the 1970s had packed the monuments to Leonardo da Vinci and Vittorio Emanuele in Piazza Scala and Piazza Duomo. If in those years Christo's actions seemed to criticise the consumer world, today Mahama's 'civil demonstrations' - as the artist describes them - tell of a much more complex world of global tensions. Through research and the transformation of materials, Ibrahim Mahama investigates some of the most important themes of contemporary life: migration, globalisation and the movement of goods and people across borders and nations. His large-scale installations employ materials gathered from urban environments, such as architectural fragments, wood, textiles and, in particular, jute sacks that are sewn together and draped over imposing architectural structures. Just as the American sacks used for the distribution of Marshall Plan food aid in Europe were probably the basis of Alberto Burri's inspiration, so Mahama's sacks are fundamental elements of his research: symbols of Ghanaian markets, they are made in Asia and imported to Africa for the international transport of food and other goods (cocoa, beans, rice, but also coal). Torn, patched and marked with various signs and co-ordinates, the sacks with their dramatic, tattered stitching become gauze that patches the wounds of history, a symbol of conflicts and dramas that have been consumed for centuries in the shadow of the global economy. At the same time, Mahama's sacks contain a more hidden meaning concerning the labour force behind the international movement of goods. The jute sack, the artist explains, "tells of the hands that lifted it, as well as the products it carried, between ports, warehouses, markets and cities. The conditions of the people remain imprisoned in it. And the same happens to the places he passes through'. To assemble the sacks, Mahama often collaborates with dozens of migrants from urban and rural areas in search of work, without documents or rights, victims of a nomadic and uncertain existence that recalls the conditions suffered by the objects used in his works. The installation A Friend by Ibrahim Mahama has been commissioned by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and produced in collaboration with miart, Milan's modern and contemporary art fair, as part of Milan Art Week 2019, a programme of events, openings and extraordinary openings in museums and public and private institutions, which brings together the main Milanese operators under the direction of the City of Milan.
