After “The Hidden”, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Italy, which was held in Milan in February 2007, Tobias Zielony’s “Vele” project, promoted and produced by Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples, includes a photographic animation that lasts nine minutes and sixteen seconds and, as an exclusive exhibit, the complete accompanying photographic series of 16 pictures.
For the entire month of October 2007, and then on a number of occasions during the following year, the artist worked in his usual way, examining how adolescents like to appear to others, the poses they adopt, and the way they “kill time” in the suburban districts of the city. He looked at the places they choose for meeting up at in the eastern area and in the north of Naples, eventually ending up at the Vele in Scampia. Consisting of 7000 shots taken at night with a digital reflex camera, and edited at an artificial speed, the Le Vele di Scampia photographic animation uses the language of cinema to convey the deprivations of those who live in or frequent these places. This is the artist’s third video work after The Deboard, which was shown in the “Play Forward” section of the 2008 Locarno film festival, and Big Sexyland, of the same year. As well as the subsidised-housing districts and the authorised private-cooperative “parks”, this part of the city is also home to a Rom camp – on the landings of the light-blue Vela (“housing units” for the designer) – with American sub-culture models (hip hop and breakdance, for example), which are local versions of global codes and the only means of reacting to boredom and urban decay, overlapping and interacting with a very strong local identity.
