“… a creative process that is historical, contextual, cultural
and therefore involves not only one’s being for oneself
but also being with others and for others”
(Marco Dallari and Cristina Francucci)

Strangers at Home
In no. 1 of 2021 of Studi Umbri (vol. 13) I had introduced what, for me, might become a column: “Strangers at Home” – an unusual thing for a journal that until now had been entirely without columns. A gathering of profiles of artists from the Umbrian world who, though they work in this region, in fact move away from certain modus operandi that the undersigned had ascribed to a generic, “exemplary” Umbrian artist. After Mario Consiglio, at number 2 – of the column, let us say – I present the work of Fabrizio Segaricci. An artist who, far from pursuing pure formal experiments with a recognisable, repeatable signature that carries an artistic intuition to its extreme consequences, navigates the horizon of the possible and turns his gaze on the things of everyday reality, drawing on the most varied idioms and aesthetic solutions.

Profile of a man and of an artist
Fabrizio Segaricci was born in 1969 in Magione (Perugia), where he lives and works. Self-taught, over the course of his path he has measured himself against an “art system” different from the strictly local one, which is, for the most part, shaped by the presence of the Perugia academy. His research is initially devoted to painting. Soon, however, he realises that what he wants to say can free itself from the limits and the conditioning of pictorial language (and of any other formal medium), and he begins to experiment with different formulas. Indifferent to any showy aesthetic recognisability, his attention is directed, more than to the formal means employed, to certain thematic cores for which he feels an expressive urgency. Central to Segaricci are the existential contradictions, whether of a historical-social nature or, rather, bound up with the micro-histories of individuals and with the way time alters their reading and their memory. He therefore works around the sense of History (with a capital H) and around the affairs of individuals with one and the same force, as if to make plain that “the personal is political”, and vice versa. His gaze, in fact, snags time and again on men adrift; on news items that in fact lay bare epochal and political contradictions; installations, video-interviews and photographs render the different attributions of meaning that single individuals, in the unfolding of time, confer on events and things. Segaricci’s is a subtle gaze, critical and poetic. The gaze of a man and a worker who can translate into art the everyday experience of those who live in any periphery of the world, but with class consciousness and human depth.

From the global to the particular, from social critique to recognition of the other
The expressive means, as we said, are secondary in Fabrizio’s research. Techniques and artistic solutions are therefore bent to the message or, better, to the need to render reality – and what he perceives of it – in a new guise. Critical, or simply other.
In 2011, for example, he begins a series of works of pointed political critique around the theme of the failure to protect and to recognise workers in our society – a connecting thread that runs through many of his works. To do so, he sets in motion a series of pieces that simply, in a Duchampian manner, decontextualise certain everyday elements. Articolo I is a large environmental installation made from ordinary safety helmets in the colours of the Italian flag, which (re)build – in the very manner of the tricolore – the façade of a building under restoration in the historic centre of Trevi¹. The work’s title cites, precisely, Article 1 of the Italian Constitution, which declares that “Italy is a Republic founded on labour”. The helmet becomes, by synecdoche, a symbol of manual labour and of the poor safety of workplaces. In the same way, the harness he builds around Cesare Aureli’s sculpture depicting Galileo Galilei and John Milton at the Complesso Museale di San Francesco, retitled Cervelli in fuga², becomes a clear allusion to Italy’s inability to keep its “brains” at home, given the insufficient protection of the professional figures that underpin our national identity.

If these works are of a more militant and critical nature, in parallel Segaricci pursues instead a more emotional and subtle inquiry into the local human context. Such is the case of the Umbrians (a work in progress since 2007). The cycle is made up of photographs of men and women who carry within them contradictions with respect to the commonly perceived line of “normality”. Fragile people, or people on the margins of society, or again people who “play at war” like adult-children in a society that claims to be ever more pacifist and well-meaning. He does so through photography, which incidentally becomes one of his most frequently used expressive means.

On photography and the consistency of a gaze
Segaricci’s photography is not photography as commonly understood. By this I do not mean to enter the age-old dispute between artistic photography and photographs of art, but simply to lead the reader to weigh the reasons and the emotion intrinsic to this author’s gaze. He uses neither formal and technical stratagems that would lend his subjects some particular aesthetic quality, nor does he intend to sample a particular situation in an exhaustive, objective, captioning manner. His lens comes to rest on stories of a humanity that opens itself to him with its own proud singularity. They are born of a dialogue between him and the subject, and they return to the public charged with an emotional rather than an aesthetic intensity. An act not new in the history of art, nor in photography, but one that – looking back over the whole of the artist’s output – in fact offers us a singular, coherent, deep and homogeneous vision of a body of work apparently so heterogeneous.
Take, for example, the cycle Domenica è sempre domenica. Here we are faced with portraits of family groups and of people who, on Sundays, live out their space of freedom along the shores of Lake Trasimeno – everyday places for the artist.

Segaricci meets them, talks with them, enters into a singular intimacy with them. The images of these men and women seem to tell us something about ourselves and about our own festive everyday life. And yet, no. These are photographs “out of time” with respect to our customs and habits. We all have memories of Sunday picnics and games on the beach, and of the days when we took keepsake photos like these (not selfies). But it is no longer we who do these things, and in this way. Those features, those poses, those clothes are incongruous with respect to a “we” and to what is perceived as today’s fashions and habits. Looking at these images we feel a kind of nostalgic, dismayed vertigo, because we realise that it is Others who now inhabit “our places” and “our habits”. They are “strangers”, and often people of a low social and cultural extraction. It is they, now, who live in the public places – not us. In a few moves, then, Segaricci renders social and cultural identity and otherness through the sheer evidence of things. There is, in these photographs, the seductive recognition and disavowal of the Other, the same as us and yet different. It is a photography that, from the singularity of individual cases and from the news of the day, manages to abstract itself and, as if in a bird’s-eye view, to render impressions at once intimate and global. And these are not single shots but cycles of photographs – which is to say cycles of encounters and of people – that give substance to the presence of a massive, silent otherness languishing amid the more blatant manifestations of a worldly, clamorous everyday life. Through his artistic work Segaricci hands them back to us: with their frontal, direct, posed gaze. For their pride of identity, and for ours.

Action as artistic and social practice
We have thus seen that Segaricci’s works sometimes criticise, sometimes take in otherness and render an unprecedented image of our present. At other times the artist is not content to record things with his divergent gaze. He becomes proactive, mobilising and transforming everyday practices into artistic actions. Such is the case of Progetto Oskar (since 2012), the artistic intervention that involves planting Oskar cherry tomatoes in abandoned, disused areas around Lake Trasimeno, in an attempt to involve the local population and passers-by in tending them. Segaricci obtains the permits, builds a bench, provides the basic equipment. He is the one who goes out to involve people and to explain that, by helping one another, not only will the tomatoes then belong to whoever tends them, but there will be a shared return for the well-being of the whole community, in terms of employment and of the care of collective resources. Later, at the Museo della Pesca, for his solo exhibition, he will present the documentation of this work together with a jar of “passata” made from the collectively grown tomatoes. In doing so, Segaricci abdicates entirely from pure aesthetic refinement and places collective, social practice at the centre of the artistic debate. The commitment of the individual and of the public to the building of a broadened common good. It is a symbolic way – as all art is – of bringing the political and the social even into the most ephemeral of human dimensions, the cultural one, which is nonetheless (or should be, let us say) at the foundation of every civilisation.

On the documentations of others: of time, of space and of life
Photography ratifies what has happened and has been at a given moment. But at the same time it documents a distance. That imposed by the passing of time, certainly, but also that of our own gaze, which from afar can reread and reinterpret events within a different historical-emotional-cultural perspective. It is into this hiatus, between reality and interpretation, that the artist lowers the metaphysics of the cycles of works in which he uses archival materials chanced upon at flea markets. I am referring to projects such as Io e Madame Ohf (work in progress since 2009) and TFR (work in progress since 2017).

In the first, the artist recovers from a junk dealer a suitcase brimming with letters and photographs of an unknown woman whom he calls, precisely, Ohf. His operation will consist in decanting all the material he has found into a video of a few minutes. The finished video condenses, in a rapid succession of images (those of anyone’s life, but simply with the face of a blonde woman), the existence of a person from birth to death. A flowing of emblematic moments: birth, the growing-up marked out by birthdays, the first successes, the presents, the loves, the children, the growing old … A whole life, all there. Hers. Ours. An artistic homage to existence. Glorious and fragile as everyone’s. Sealed in sealing wax. The mystery of the meaning each of us gives to the flow of an existence which, in any case, is destined for the tragedy of death and disappearance, and yet, in memory, is steeped in the fragrance of being-there and of youth.

With Tfr, by contrast, Segaricci re-stages a number of reels (deteriorating 16mm films) and documents of certain workers’ demonstrations, likewise chanced upon. These are glimpses of a black-and-white life, of a provincial world seen from the bottom of the working-class condition, which nonetheless, within the space of contemporary art, come to be present once more. The artist mounts the films on a light box, arranging some fragments in dense succession, then provides a magnifying glass with which to look at each single frame as a unicum within a continuum. He retitles the whole “TFR”, that is, trattamento di fine rapporto [severance pay]. Simply by altering the normal viewing and the context of perception of that material, he grants us a new gaze and new questions about our past identity which, evidently, is also our present identity. History seen, once again, from some periphery. Ordinary men who build ordinary things such as the rights guaranteed to our right-thinking lives.

Knowing as an act of recognition
Segaricci, then, is a “stranger at home”. He works in a way that diverges from the Umbrian one. He does not obsessively experiment with a single material. He does not interrogate a reference text, nor is he jealous of some artistic formula he has hit upon. His works are composed of the debris of social life, but not in a merely descriptive way. The exemplarity of lives, even the humblest, resounds with History and with Universals through the weave of Segaricci’s works. There is the bittersweet savour of a time that changes everything and, at every instant, rechristens the existential and ideological sense that moves us. There is the news of the day, which nonetheless is not episodic and destined to be forgotten and to lose meaning over the long term, but becomes an exemplary instant. In his works the real is described as a void (what was and might have been: Madame Ohf and TFR) or as what seems but is not (the Umbrians and Domenica è sempre domenica). Their seduction, therefore, is not the aesthetic one of the well-made, of resemblance and fidelity to the real, nor of the technically original, but rather the acute, metaphysical one that makes us see the real under another semblance, in becoming, in perceptual disintegration. To images of documentary exactitude he prefers the abstracting sense of a clock without hands. To the skilled hand of the creator, he prefers the hand of the framer, who brings out the value of what is already there.
The knowledge that filters through his poetics (I am strenuously convinced that art has, for each of us, a profound cognitive function) is the one that transforms the ego alter into an alter egoⁱ: the viewer enters into communion with the subjects of his works, understands them. Which does not mean “knowing the salinity of their tears”, but entering into an empathic connection and passing through oneself the other that is also me.

To each their own space
From 2004 to the present, Segaricci has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in prestigious public and private spaces in Italy and abroad, among them Circolo Quadro Milan, Palazzo Lucarini Trevi, CRAC Centro Arte Contemporanea Cremona, Contemporary Cluster Rome, Viafarini Milan, Sassetti Cultura Milan, Teatro Accento Rome, Trevi Flash Art Museum Trevi-Perugia, Museolaboratorio Città Sant’Angelo Pescara, Pinacoteca Barão de Santo Ângelo / Instituto de Artes, Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil, Istituto Italiano di Cultura Madrid, Museum of New Art Detroit.
He has carved out a space for himself in places of research, experimentation and cultural debate different from the Umbrian critical-cultural circuits. I have followed him since way back in 2003 and rarely miss the chance to see how his research evolves. Perhaps because, like him, I belong to that circle of people who do not want simply to be and to be present, but to try to understand the why of being and being present.

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