BARRIKEA
Exhibition by Alfredo Da Venezia
Curated by collettivoSERRA
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On display from 09/03/2025 to 05/04/2025
Opening Sunday 09/03/2025 at 18:00
Lancetti railway station, Milan
BARRIKEA is the title of the exhibition by Alfredo Da Venezia, part of IRA GENERANS, the exhibition season 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.
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Alfredo Da Venezia employs the methodologies and lines of thought from design and architecture as artistic operations, describing himself as a “design militant, architecture sympathizer.” Since 2016, he has worked with digital modeling and 3D printing, creating artworks that range from plastic models to their digital photographic reproductions and the development of inflatable objects for various exhibitions and curatorial projects, successfully showcased around the world. 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.
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BARRIKEA explores anger 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.
Alfredo Da Venezia (Santiago, Chile, 1973) is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice focuses on digital modeling, 3D printing, and the creation of 1:1 scale inflatable models—tools through which he develops curatorial projects and exhibitions. His works, including notable traveling pieces, have been exhibited in Chile, Spain, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Italy. Throughout his career, his commitment to experimentation and collaboration has allowed him to participate in numerous projects and exhibitions. He has presented his work at the Chiquita Room in Barcelona (2019), in the AMACI Selection (2021) and at LOC in Sicily (2021), as well as at Espacio O in Chile (2023). Moreover, his proposals have reached institutions such as the MAM Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno in Cuenca and the Museo Antropológico y de Arte Contemporáneo in Guayaquil, Ecuador; Materia Gris and Casa Matony in La Paz, Bolivia (2015). He currently serves as co-curator of the artistic space EMPEGNO, located in Bracciano (Rome), further consolidating his commitment to the diffusion and innovation of contemporary art.