FILIPPO MINELLI @ Spazio Leonardo ACROSS THE BORDER Curated by UNA

UNA is pleased to announce the continuation of its collaboration with #spazioleonardo, the new space of Leonardo Assicurazioni - Generali Milano Liberazione, located in Porta Nuova.
Curated by #una, the program includes three solo exhibitions by Italian artists who will present a site- specific project for Spazio Leonardo’s gallery: #filippominelli (February- April 2019); Elia Cantori (in collaboration with the gallery CarDrde, May-September 2019); Stefano Serretta (October-December 2019).

For the first exhibition, #una brings the project Across the Border by #filippominelli (*Brescia, 1983) to Milan. The project was originally presented as part of the program for Manifesta12 - the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, at Palazzo Ajutamicristo in Palermo.

- Filippo Minelli's work is part of many research areas that primarily concern the classic seventeenth-century theme of the landscape, expanded, revised and brought back in terms in which a political and historical discourse intersect. To this is added the survey on participatory models that led the artist to travel for ten years, meeting #people and weaving a random network of performers, and producing and putting in circulation 44 flags, which form the project on show, Across the Border.
The artist defines his own research “Transnational Aesthetics” – able to connect the periphery to the global. This allows a creation of symbols and “iconic words” for new hypothetical nations conceived by a generation that no longer lives borders in a traditional way, but inhabits the world in fluid form. This new aesthetic manifests itself on flags – the ideal terrain for identification and signaling – to become mediums for epiphany messages and neologisms: IODINE, a medicine to prevent thyroid cancer screamed on a flag of a small Belgian town close to a nuclear power plant; BELEAF, from Mumbai, written with the leaves of a felled tree that means resurrection, hope for the rebirth of a now tamed nature; HORMONES instead becomes a word play with “HOR-MONES”, then “horror”, mirror, according to the Lebanese activist, the horrors of the ruling class of the country.