Antonio Rovaldi's 'End-Words from the margins' at GAMeC in Bergamo

Antonio Rovaldi (Parma, 1975; lives in Milan and New York) presents his project 'End-Words from the margins, New York city' at GAMeC in Bergamo, hosted in the spaces of the adjacent Accademia Carrara. The project, winner of the fifth edition of the Italian Council, includes a book and now becomes an exhibition conceived as a single large installation occupying an entire room, transforming it into a peculiar semi-urban panorama. Rovaldi walked the extreme zones of New York's five boroughs, collecting images and objects that evoke human presence without directly depicting it. The work explores the concept of limit, border, and terrain vague, connecting New York's specific sociological situation to global transformations. The exhibition features groupings based on discrete iconographic consonances, alternations of full and empty, and relationships between lines and geometries. Traces of tires in snow, abandoned shoes, useless fences, trees, animals, monuments, and small everyday objects form a map of social relationships either ended or ready to revive. Photography is used as an investigative tool rather than pure expression, alongside audio and video traces. Two sculptures link past, present, and future: one represents a horseshoe crab, a prehistoric-looking animal still present in New York Bay; the other is a computer keyboard now unusable, like a relic of the present found in a futuristic time. The exhibition opts for synthesis over a complete but self-referential archive.