4 boxing gyms in Northern Italy
Between the months of May and July 2002 Andrea Crociani visited four boxing gyms in Northern Italy and did a series of video shots and interviews with boxers in various categories, both amateur and professional. With the video material gathered he made a 40 minute film documenting the activity in the different gyms.
At borgovico 33 the video will be continuously projected in the entrance hall while in the principal space of the church, a 5 x 5 meter platform will be placed in the center serving as a sort of "ring" — "meeting" place — where the spectator can sit on the edge and read the magazine-paper the artist put together of the interviews he did with eight boxers. In this project Crociani focuses attention on the boxing world which is highly conditioned by stereotypes that are quite far from reality. Crociani makes a broader attempt to undermine preconceptions using investigation and a direct understanding of a specific situation.
Download the interviews

For Andrea Crociani, the artistic process is a privileged vantage point for analyzing reality and its products. Crociani’s reflections on the contemporary world are aimed at fettering out prejudice and clichés. The topic of violence and the relationship of force within society, takes priority as a subject for research. In his work, Crociani uses and re-elaborates images produced by mass media (newspapers, magazines, internet) on the computer and does in-depth investigation on themes that are particularly marked by widespread stereotypes.
The photographic series entitled Cocktails (1999-2000) is made up of various cocktail recipes illustrated with images pertaining to the Second World War; both images are taken from books. The combination between text and images generates an unusual reaction producing different sense elements. In the video L’archivazione è un’arte borghese /archiving is a bourgeois art (2000), 84 technical drawings of warplanes (viewed frontally, laterally and from above) are repeatedly projected for half a second.
The obsessive interaction transforms the initial formal beauty of the drawing into a signal of violence. Signor Errico Malatesta (2001), a one person show at the Juliane Wellerdiek Gallery in Berlin, is made up of a long text written by the artist on Errico Malatesta, the Italian anarchist. The text is available to the visitor at a symbolic price so that he can take it away with him for more in-depth reading. The text is accompanied by a video that shows the artist’s Berlin apartment with the objects that compose and define it, and five photographic portraits of Malatesta.