Branco

Branco is an installation consisting of a variable group of sculptures evoking stray dogs that roam the cities of the Mediterranean—animals accustomed to surviving in precarious conditions and moving through ever-changing, improvised spaces while maintaining a fragile group balance.

Following the idea of anarchic progress, the project explores ethnic, racial, and linguistic differences, situating itself randomly in spaces. It represents an improvised and transient social structure, reflecting the unstable conditions typical of port cities.

Branco is an anti-monumental architectural structure: a dissonance of poses, gestures, and gazes that takes shape as a mobile group of sculptures, reminiscent of an urban periphery—anarchic, informal, and multiethnic. The materials used for the sculptures echo those of unregulated construction: concrete, iron, wire mesh, metal sheets, tar, and lead.

Each element of the installation, which was first created in 2003 and is still evolving, is named after one of the 450 “ghost cities” scattered across the globe. Each name reflects the rise and fall of a place that, through dynamics of aggregation and survival, once realized the utopian dream of a city but ultimately failed, leaving behind the legend of a ghost town:
 Africo, Agdam, Agyra, Al Bara, Alta, Amendolea, Anadyrsk, Ani, Animas Forks, Antelope, Antuni, Apice, Arena, Arltunga, Armero, Asang, Ashio, Ashopton, Avi, Ayutthaya...