ART CITIES:Rome-Zerocalcare

Zerocalcare is the pen name of Michele Rech, Italy’s best-selling graphic novel artist of the past twenty years. His pen name was inspired by an Italian TV commercial jingle because he had to choose a nickname to join a discussion on Internet. Alaways linked to the underground scene, a spokeperson of the 90s’ generation, which grew up amongst precariousness and the web, the G8 in Genoa and TV series, Zerocalcare is the protagonist of a large exhibition at MAXXI.

By Dimitris Lemesis
Photo: MAXXI Archive

Zerocalcare’s exhibition “Digging Ditches Feeding Crocodiles” is his first solo show and covers the full career of the artist, always associated with the underground scene. The layout of the exhibition has been inspired by the Armadillo, the character created by Zerocalcare and the protagonist of most of his strips and his books, the artist’s conscience and alter ego. The exhibition is structured in four sections. Pop is the first chapter of the exhibition, and it includes illustrations and comics inspired by biographical stories, some of which published in the author’s blog starting from 2011. Within this context, Michele Rech paints a clear picture of the themes concerning the native generation of the 1980s, those who grew  up surrounded by Game Boy, Marvel comics, superheroes and Pixar feature films. It is the portrait of a generation that is born with everything, but that gradually sees the rights that its fathers had conquered vanish. Young people who grow up during the economic boom, but who eventually see their dream of the nation as the promised land begin to fade. In this first part, the confrontation with today’s youth – and the realization that everything has changed, is ironically expressed through the presentation of pop icons and some cult comics like “Pedagogia e Iggiovanidoggi” (2012), and “La paura piü grande” (2015). The exhibition continues with an analysis of the demons of our day and age: social networks, always being connected, and productivity. The theme ends with a series of illustrations taken from episodes of everyday life. The picture, as realistic as it is disenchanted, of our contemporary age, the mirror of a society that is permanently in crisis, is also present in Struggles and Resistances. This section includes comic strips transformed by the artist into a playground for the formation of public space and civic life, posters, illustrations made to support a host of initiatives, self-published fanzines, periodicals devoted to an in-depth analysis of the underground culture. The theme dealt with in these boards concerns political conquests, it portrays different social opposition movements from recent years, and it describes the central role played by some occupied spaces in the development of a culture of difference. The section also includes news stories, such as the one about the death of Renato Biagetti* in “La politica non c’entra niente” (2007), or about Gaetano Bresci** in “Autocensure” (2015), presented together with statement-boards against the abuse of power in “Copsville” (2012). Non – Reportage is the third section of the exhibition. The G8 in Genoa, in 2001, was a major event, which author considers a turning point in his life, the one that inspired him to create his first comic strip, published anonymously in Indymedia. A black wall is devoted to the event, and it includes boards and posters like “La memoria è un ingranaggio collettivo (La nostra storia alla sbarra)” (2004), “Non è finite” (2006), “A.F.A.B.” (2011) and “In ogni caso nessun rimorso” (2018). This is followed by a series of reports on the facts from the national and international news, based on personal experiences or journeys. Besides Gaza, in 2006, and Iraq, in 2014, the artist traveled to Kobanî, where the Kurds of the Strip resist being attacked by ISIS, and whose history of resistance was published in 2015 in the weekly Internazionale, and later in the book “Kobane Calling”. This section includes numerous in-depth analyses: news reports, eye-witness accounts, with the spirit of reportage, and transformed into the intimate diary of a traveler of our day and age.  The heart of the exhibition, the section entitled Tribes, crosses all of the themes on display. A selection of about forty illustrated boards tells how the author’s most authentic truth resides in punk culture, in that which he himself calls his “tribe,” the “family you belong to,” the “Indian reservation.” The punk scene is made up of a social organism that is determined and coherent, it is expressed in currents, looks, musical genres, ideologies, and a variety of lifestyles, such as Straight Edge, a ‘philosophy’ that rejects drugs and drug abuse, which the author embraced when he was seventeen. It is impossible to locate the movement in a single train of thought, and this is why, as concerns punk, only CD and album covers can be used to speak, presented in this section as “Anime Corsare di Klaxon e Gli Ultimi” (2015), and in the concert posters that link radical politics to extreme music. This section of the exhibition, conceived by the author as a tribute to the complexity of the movement and ‘to all those rebels inspired by the impetus of change,’ offers a description of the Italian punk scene in the past fifteen years.

*Renato Biagetti was a young graduate in engineering who, at 26, on 27/8/2006, returning from a beach party on the Roman coast in Focene, was attacked and killed by two young neo-fascists.

**Gaetano Bresci (11/11/1869-22/5/1901) was an Italian American anarchist who killed Italian King Umberto I in response to a massacre of workers in Milan on 29/7/1900. Bresci stood trial in Milan and on August 29 was sentenced to a life of hard labour on Santo Stefano, the island prison infamous for its many anarchist and socialist prisoners. He was not to stay long. Less than a year later he was found hanged in his cell, his body being thrown into the sea by prison guards soon after. Although suicide was given as the official explanation for his death, this was widely disputed at the time and it now seems more likely that he was killed by his guards.

Info: Curator: Giulia Ferracci, MAXXI – National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Via Guido Reni 4A, Rome, Duration 10/11/18-10/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri & Sun 11:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-22:00, www.maxxi.art