BARRIKEA
BARRIKEA
Curated by collettivoSERRA
On display from 09/03/2025 to 05/04/2025
Lancetti railway station, Milan
BARRIKEA is the title of the exhibition by Alfredo Da Venezia, part of IRA GENERANS, the exhibitionseason that explores anger as a necessary and natural response to both social and personal injustices and oppressions. Seen as a driving force for transformation and change, anger becomes the focal point of a collective reflection that involves artists and collectives, who are called upon to legitimize themselves through their artistic practice.
SpazioSERRA presents BARRIKEA, an artwork composed of commercial products that aims to criticize consumerism and homogenization, highlighting how protest symbols can lose their original meaning when they are incorporated into the very system they seek to challenge.
BARRIKEA exploresanger as a driving force for resistance and transformation through the contradiction of its components: domestic design objects are repurposed into barricades, thereby denouncing a capitalism capable of assimilating even the symbols of rebellion. This transformation unveils the vulnerability of opposition, as protest is assimilated and neutralized by the market. In this way, anger becomes a strategic engine. Da Venezia constructs the artwork based on well-defined design methodologies, transforming anger into structure,message, and an object of debate—a space of protection to reorganize and imagine alternative possibilities. Three-dimensional slogans rise like backlit protest signs, fervent declarations of anger and defiance that directly oppose the structural violence of neoliberalism. The illuminated words create an immersive experience, enveloping the viewer in a place where resistance and indignation emerge as necessary and legitimate responses to oppression. At the conclusion of the exhibition, Da Venezia hopes that the artwork will continue to forge connections by donating the installation’s chairs to a non-profit institution. This symbolic gesture disrupts the consumerist logic, returning to the community an element that was originally linked to a sign of protest. It is an exhortation to conceive concrete alternatives and to counteract the dynamics of capitalist power.
Photography courtesy of: collettivoSERRA
8 light boxes 3D printed in PLA
20 meters of cold white flexible LED tubing
24 IKEA chairs, GENESÖN model, donated to the Libera Compagnia di Arti & Mestieri Sociali collective at the end of the exhibition
