Paranoid Parchetti

Visions and pigeons in the local green. Boredom and paranoia, nocturnal odysseys and generational secrets: Paranoid Parchetti cites the title of the 2007 film ‘Paranoid Park’ by Gus Van Sant to return to the collective, but personally incongruous, imagery of the neighborhood park: a mystical, layered zone that our personal mythologies have shaped in form and mood, defying the strict classification of urban spaces.

From neorealist cinema to the imagery of crime, from the rap park and then to the personal one of anyone who has ever tied their memories to it, the parchetto is something we all known, yet different for everyone. There is no vocabulary that mentions it. It is not a park, it is not a garden. Yet we are all familiar with its tremor. What it looks like, what it smells like. Our stories have entangled in those weeds along with the dirty clinex, and we can still manage a glimpse of them if we cross it after years. That is why there are also parchetti that we no longer want to return to, that we prefer to look from afar, and parchetti that are the archives of our most tangible traces: initials engraved on acacia trees or on a swing, and together with ours, those of other past and future ‘parkonauts’.

Following a trajectory from the world to the mind, those of Cosimo Casoni, Alice Faloretti and Andrea Luzi are three representative modes of humanised nature. For Cosimo, a parchetto is a playground, which ties in directly with his biographical and artistic background, the urban underculture and ‘street’ attitude that overturns city architecture into a potentially infinite playground. For Alice, the gaze mixes the visual with the emotional, the space is deformed and tinged with the feeling of those who pass through it. In a reminiscence of romantic restlessness, her little park can expand until it becomes a wood, an endless, convulsive forest of hurricanes and dismay before human finitude. Lastly, with Andrea we are fully in the realm of vision. The space is populated with fantasies and creatures that come out from behind the hedge, detach themselves from the painted walls or from the underground, and wander around the park like ghosts. What form does a paranoia take? And what was that murmur behind the bush?