Ice and the city are closely related. The shattered ice – The Ice – touches The Space, the urban space. It is, at first glance, a gentle encounter. Max Serradifalco’s glimpses of Tokyo or New York resemble plastic souvenirs filled with liquid and white straws: just shake them and it starts snowing. And yet, on closer inspection, the photograph is disturbing. The humans present, with their faces blurred for privacy reasons, are confused and expressionless. Running hither and thither like automatons, or like the white bears from the History Channel, they roam the cities of the world amid traffic lights – an invitation to stop, to proceed no further – and portents of doom: London Bridge as seen from below, almost as if it were about to collapse-”London bridge is falling down,” in addition to being the title of an old nursery rhyme and a song by the Wiggles, is the code name for the plan of what would happen in the days following the death of Queen Elizabeth: the end of an era – to New York posters hinting at a “later,” to ice in the sky awfully similar to the huge hailstones that – news reports hand down – are increasingly raining down in Japan, to the rushing wind that shakes a tent in the heart of Palermo: a weather event that is unusual, to say the least, in a land that a decade ago, invaded by fog for once, set a record for emergency calls from concerned citizens: “Help, there has been an attack!” Art, Picasso claimed, is a lie that makes one understand the truth; the truth that the superimposition of horizontal and vertical, Street View – the cities – and Google Earth – Greenland, the once green and therefore warm subcontinent – of Max’s works clearly reveals: the chosen places are among those most affected by rising seas due to melting glaciers. The ground at our feet-a sheet of thin ice-is on the verge of collapse.
(Andrea Guastella)