20_0_20 – irresponsible_surrealities
I have lived and worked between Biella and Turin for more than twenty years. Two cities that look at each other without touching, two rhythms brushing past one another like the lines of a weave. In 2017, in that interval of roads and trains, I felt something shift. Not an event, not a piece of news: a tremor. A thin crack in the way the world was breathing.
I work mainly with the technique of weaving materials and photographs. The weave was born almost by chance in 2014, by interlacing world maps with PVC: the Earth breaking apart, swelling, changing borders like a restless animal. Everything began from that gesture. The weave became my mother tongue: a way to say what cannot be said, to show what cannot be shown.
I brought it onto bodies, identities, gender, eroticism, travel experiences, and collective urban regeneration projects. Each time the image opened like a fabric revealing its hidden pattern. Each time I understood that the weave does not represent: it reveals the inner tension of things.
Then, in 2017, came the intuition. If the world was disintegrating, if borders were shifting like sand, if reality was losing consistency, then I had to look at the faces of those who were guiding that world.
It wasn’t a political choice. It was a necessity.
I began weaving their faces. And as I did, I felt that gesture becoming a ritual: a poetic act, a meditative act, an act of resistance. Music—always piano—kept me balanced. My hands followed a rhythm that accompanied the work, as when I perform: present, focused, vulnerable, inside a gesture that is never merely technical.
Every face became a landscape. Every face became a symptom.
Trump
In his face the weave does not deform: it explodes. The lines swell like veins under tension, contradicting each other, rebelling against form. The black wave crossing the upper part is a wave that no longer knows where to go, an energy shattering as it advances. A portrait that does not seek balance, because balance does not belong to him. A loss of sense of reality, replaced by “narratives,” mass distractions: a madness shared by all the figures.
Benjamin Netanyahu
The face remains still, almost petrified. It is the weave that moves above him, drawing shapes reminiscent of symbols from the past, but inverted, mirrored, white. A way to speak of memory, of what returns when it is not processed; annihilated by the logic of the “just,” which loses humanity and makes room for the annihilation of a people. The confirmation that history teaches nothing, that suffered violence becomes blind revenge—useless and counterproductive.
Xi Jinping
Here the weave becomes discipline. A constant, mathematical, inexorable progression. The strips advance like an order that allows no deviation, like a structure growing without leaving space for the unexpected. The black wave does not break: it proceeds. Silent, geometric, inevitable.
Putin
A face that seems to emerge from another era, as if time had decided to fold in on itself. The weave shifts the light by a few millimeters, but enough to bring forth an ancient unease. The style is a citation of the nineteenth‑century Russian painter Ivan Kramskoi: from the black background emerges a distorted Putin, with demonic traits. A portrait that does not look: it scrutinizes.
Kim Jong-un
A childish, almost playful weave, but in the play the form deforms. The face rounds, the eyes narrow, as if power were a disguise, a mask no longer able to contain its own theatre. A theatre not of backdrops and representations, but the constant risk of a theatre of war—foolish and reckless.
Macron
Two mirrored images woven together. A face looking right and left at the same instant. A double direction, a double expectation, a balance that never finds a fixed point. Symbolically, the representation of the European condition in general
Salvini
The weave draws a shape recalling historical drifts already seen. The weave does not alter the face, does not break it apart: the photographic strips draw a swastika. It is not an accusation, not a judgment: it is a signal. The perception of a right‑wing drift without history, an aesthetic rather than ideological right, detached from the contemporary, looking only backward without moving forward. A line that repeats, and when a line repeats, it is never harmless.
Angela Merkel
Here the weave does not hold. It interrupts, gives way, collapses. Like an engine losing power, like a structure no longer able to bear the weight it carried for years. A portrait telling the end of a cycle: the end of an idea of a united Europe collapsing economically. Germany has always been its engine, and its faltering reveals a continent in constant decline of geopolitical influence.
Bashar al-Assad
Two images: one upright, one upside down. The weave creates a texture reminiscent of an oriental carpet, a repeating motif, a cycle that does not break. A face that is never just one, because reality is never just one. The transformation of one of the many Middle Eastern states, suspended between yielding to hyper‑capitalism and abandoning its historical identity at a quantifiable price.
I limit myself to mentioning these more or less autocratic heads of state, certainly representative, but the work continued, pursuing this human collapse without ideological distinctions.
In 2019 I presented this work in Turin, at Fo.To. Fotografi a Torino, the international photography week. It was part of the Ph Memories section. I remember the air: dense, suspended, as if the world were holding its breath. The works seemed to speak of something we were not yet ready to name.
But 20_0_20 was not only this. It was a project in three movements, like a discordant symphony.
1. 20_O_20 irresponsible_surrealities – archiving the present
Power deforming. The perception of the world filtered through the faces that govern it. Distortion as symptom. The portrait as a cracked mirror of an era.
2. 20_O_20 irresponsible_surrealities – unstudiedillnesses
The body as a battlefield. Silhouettes of faces carved into plexiglass sheets, crossed by therapies, pollution, toxic diets. The body falling while saying “so far so good.” An archive of contemporary fragilities: biopolitics seeping into flesh, illness as landscape, care as a desperate gesture. A work that does not denounce: it observes.
3. 20_O_20 irresponsible_surrealities – auman
Nature as a silent judge. Landscapes of randomly chosen mountains woven symmetrically, dissolving, collapsing, creating disorientation and distorted visions, to escape the presumption of interpreting the natural world only from the “human” point of view. Ecocide as horizon, the Earth continuing to exist without us. A weave that does not want to explain, but to remind us that humans are guests, not protagonists.
Power, body, nature. Fall, distortion, extinction. Three ways of saying that the world was shedding its skin.
Since 2019 I have stopped exhibiting in traditional circuits, galleries, exhibitions. My path was in full expansion: solo shows in Italy and abroad, growing attention from specialized press, important collaborations. It was a moment when everything seemed to be opening. And it was precisely then that I felt the need to stop.
I understood that art was no longer a tool of consciousness, that collecting was becoming an algorithm, that the art system was experiencing the same crisis I had woven into my works. Culture, as it was conceived and disseminated, no longer served. The “art system” had become a collapsing house. I preferred to step away before the collapse, to regain a sense of freedom—also expressive.
So I chose silence. Absence. The void as a political gesture. The void as a poetic gesture. The void as a necessary gesture.
I walk along the margins, continuing to perform with Stalker Teatro and to work in participatory contexts, where the referents are people, not proclamations.
Today, looking back at those works, the word that comes to me is anticipation. Or perhaps vision. Because art, when it works, does not describe the present: it precedes it. And when the world collapses, art does not console: it warns.
When I stopped exhibiting I felt many things: relief, pain, freedom, anger, silence. A combination of everything. As always.
And perhaps this is what remains: that art does not serve to understand the world, but to see what is coming. And sometimes, seeing is already resisting.
Contacts
E mail: gigi.piana@yahoo.it
Links
Sito web: gigipiana.com
