Eva Frapiccini

Eva Frapiccini often questions memory and the relationship that connects places, facts and people. As she has explained, her work Muri di piombo (Walls of Lead), 2004–07, emerged from her personal need to broaden her knowledge about the “years of lead,” the dramatic period during the latter half of the 1970s that was characterized, in Italy, by criminal acts on the part of bands of armed terrorists. The project, which began in Turin — the city the artist has chosen as her current home and a place where terrorism raged with particular ferocity — subsequently went on to include other places and cities that also suffered terribly, such as Milan, Rome and Genoa. Adopting a partially documentary and openly subjective method, the artist shot the fifty photographs that make up the work while going to crime sites, during the same month when the crimes occurred, in some cases assuming the viewpoint of the victim, in others that of the assassin, in still others that of witnesses. The texts that are part of the project are, instead, excerpts from articles published at the time, in newspapers such as La Stampa, Il Corriere della Sera or La Repubblica, which the artist also used during the project’s preparatory phase. The juxtaposition of images, shot about thirty years later, with words written when the crimes took place, creates a compresence of two different temporal registers, which brings into the present personal memories of those who encounter the work.
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