Page 36 - Milano Periferia

forgotten among sheaves of straw and rows of prefabricated buildings
against a horizon reminiscent of a Titanic battle, a sloping half-dark facade
on which the thin branches of the rose-bushes soften the century-old iron
of the gratings.

Having in such a macroscopic way changed the physical dimensions of
the static town, which has become - as was to be foreseen - dynapolis,
megalopolis, dynamegalopolis (the phenomenon on the other hand is
world-wide), not only has the human dimension been put into a crisis or
excluded, but the environments themselves tend more and more to escape
the control of the citizens, already deprived of their status. Until when will
the present structure endure, until when will any town-plan be always
delayed and overcome by the jarring reality? Until when will monocentrism
afflict, with the consequent discard of town values, with its story of parking
queues, the composite urban aggregation, which seems so elegant to the
ignorant, in reality hardly functional on its borders which yet alternate,
around the primitive nucleus, the ancient and the new? The answer will
be provided by the architects of the future.

Meanwhile the outskirts! in their polyp-like gigantism of today, in their lack
of an original "Gestalt", claim a man who is not willing to yield to levell-
ing, to under-utilization and to brutal survival, a man who, dissatisfied and
neurotic, does not let his imagination be killed.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC "SIGN" AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

The photographic reportage of Carnisio and Lumbau, already well-known
to the Milanese "paleoconcerned" genre amateurs, though revived with
a modern spirit (see "La ringhiera" and "Osterie a Milano"), this time
deals with the theme just in its most diverting and heterodox aspect, at
the point when the "beautiful", once complacently cherished, becomes
dissonant and atonal, gathering clashes of slums, of bidonvilles, views of
streets desolate and pompous in their useless broadness though under
the clear light of the Lombardic sky, termitaries pretentious of futuristic
functionality, which are made to appear as a mirage to the homeless people
who come to Milan in search of a house with a working lift, a shiny tiled
bathroom, the moquette, the central heating.

The images which develop, wisely framed in a lucid treatise between the
Cartesian and the anthropological, show also an original paging which,
far from seeking the support of the white page, as it is usual with certain
immediately out-dated montages, ensures the flowing of a deep thought
which always finds, in the visual sign, a "crescendo" style progressively
enriched with motives, quite adherent to the theme.

The "Outskirts of Milan" then appear in this reportage with pokes of
concealed polemic and of counter-culture; but one can also observe the