I’ve always been fascinated by landscapes and public spaces, and by using them to talk about people in a broader sense. Sometimes this happens through impromptu approaches, and sometimes through long-term research into features, history, developments, and political and economic entanglements. I always begin with photography, as it allows me to observe and catalogue; from there, the work develops into installations, performances, actions, and the acceleration or subversion of narratives in various forms, including painting.

I’m mostly drawn to the contemporary landscape and to the ways it can help decode events and ideologies, how they shape personal and collective identity, and how they create the frame we move within, most of the time without our even imagining alternative realities. Reading the landscape is a way to decode power structures, or the absence of power itself; it offers the possibility of seeing which patterns recur across different forms of power and of connecting historical paths with the evolution of populations.

Most of my artworks are visually strong, and sometimes aesthetically appealing, because they draw from commercial aesthetics, digital imagery, slogans, and propaganda. Speaking of the contemporary landscape, which is something I have focused on for 20 years, I ended up in a loop of repetitions on an international scale, following the homogenization created by neoliberal ideology and its tool of expansion, globalization.

For more than a decade, I documented prints placed in public spaces internationally: representations of an idealized city. These included renderings on construction sites, or images simply placed to fill voids, as well as printed textures of bricks, marble, water, and skies covering objects, windows, and spaces. I also printed stock images frequently used in advertising, both physical and digital, and placed them in the landscape to create glitches here and there, or built installations with them.

In a recent exhibition, I also painted these stock images using my fingerprints in order to bring personal identity into relation with the digital abstraction of our perception. In many cases, I mount or frame multiple photos from different countries to create plausible narratives in a context devoid of its own origin and reality, underlining this ubiquity. I do this in various ways and with different aesthetic results.

In the past, I was more interested in actions and public interventions, but I use those methods less and less, since neoliberalism has found a way to appropriate dissent—at least its most superficial forms—and turn it into propaganda for its own ends as well.

Ongoing thread. More from Filippo Minelli to follow.