Zerocalcare. After the bang: the cartoonist's big solo show at the Fabbrica del Vapore

The Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan will host the exhibition Zerocalcare from December 17, 2022 to April 23, 2023. After the bang, the solo show featuring more than five hundred original plates, videos, sketches, illustrations and asite-specific work by Michele Rech, aka Zerocalcare. After the success of the Netflix series Tear Along the Edges, the well-known cartoonist will be the protagonist of a major Milanese exhibition.

Curated by Giulia Ferracci, the solo show is conceived by Silvia Barbagallo, produced by Arthemisia and organized by Minimondi Eventi and Arthemisia in collaboration with Piuma, and promoted by the City of Milan-Cultura. It intends to be an exhibition that welcomes within itself two souls of the same coin: on the one hand, its protagonists, each emblematic of an existential and collective symbolic carrier of values related to survival in a context that is now increasingly difficult to live in; on the other hand, it wants to remind the visitor that it is still possible to do “a piece of the road together” with those who have the same goals, to nurture a collective passion connected to the ideal of political resistance, to the great issues of the common man in the face of life’s trials.

If the shattering of a community, as recounted by the author in Macerie prime (2017) and Macerie prime six months later (2018), is a survival reaction linked to the condition of uncertainty one experiences, for Zerocalcare the real solution comes throughcollective action that is put into play every day. Social fragmentation in the aftermath of the pandemic,heightened fears at the time of a global crisis and conflict in the heart of Europe, and the forced isolation and loneliness that have inevitably generated disintegration and caused a loss of contact with reality, politics, and resistance are just some of the themes the exhibition aims to address.

The exhibition layout will project the audience inside an imaginative, post-apocalyptic city where, at the center of the scene, is placed a street surrounded by buildings designed by the author. The facades of the buildings affected by a planetary cataclysm lead to a reflection on how much our private lives and our contribution in the collective dimension have changed as a result of the pandemic: behind the sealed doors of the houses are glimpsed the eyes of those who seek escapes of survival and tentacles of monstrous animals attempt to escape. Starting from this scenario, among display cases featuring some of the plates created by Zerocalcare during the months of the lockdown, the various sections of the exhibition unfold, following the themes dearest to the author: from the forms of resistance embodied by the Kurdish people to the workers protesting for more dignified living conditions; from the role of women to the many other battles conducted by ordinary people as an expression of daily resistance.

The inhabitants of this seemingly devastated city but one that maintains a vital resistance, emblematically represented by a flame held up by some of them, are the men and historical Zerocalcaresque protagonists, from the Boar, to the Secco, to Lady Cocca.

The exhibition route then develops in the two areas behind the buildings, conceived as two different “worlds,” the one inside and the one outside the author. While on the one hand, the contents referring to relationships and social injustices - Strati (The Essential no. 15, 2022), Memory is a Collective Gear (Our History at the Bar, 2004) and plates such as La Rabbia (2016) taken from the punk world where the author comes from, on the other hand we access the biographical world, Zerocalcare’s inner life, the everyday life where the artist’s anxieties and fears actually tell the life of so many of us, with irony.

Closing the path are the Patron Saints, portraits on canvas and gold leaf from the author’s mythical imagination that represent typical characters from his repertoire, some famous, some lesser-known: from the T-rex to Robin Hood’s Lady Cocca, from Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain to Italian anarchist Gaetano Bresci, to the courageous human rights defender Nasrin and Secco, Rech’s longtime friend. Saints play a symbolic role within the exhibition itinerary both as signs of protection and as fighters against the inequity and injustice of our present. Icons central to our contemporary times that tell, in a lighthearted way, that today’s saints and heroes are not only those who sacrifice their lives with memorable deeds but are those who fight daily to have a place in the world.

The catalog is published by Bao Publishing.

Zerocalcare. After the bang: the cartoonist's big solo show at the Fabbrica del Vapore

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