ENRICO GILI
ERRAND SOULS BENEATH HONG KONG
by Patrizia Bottallo
What captures us more, appearance or disappearance?
Garbage is all that was once useful, gathered and disposed off by errand souls, beneath the shadow of shiny skyscrapers.
Objects, trash, boxes, tin containers, glass, plastic, divided to be placed back together in a new order, they are in this case synonymous of survival.
It’s a new order, compressed and repressed, organized by day and by night, to sustain people consumed by life.
Thinking about it, if all this trash was compressed, it would appear ordered, not temporary, and illegal.
Order and disorder, accumulation, or excess.
A sense of decadence, but at the same time of power, deposited at great architectural structures’ feet, becomes a symbol of a futuristic metropolis.
Hong Kong, a mixture of old and new, symbol of disequilibrium in between opposite worlds.
Shiny, modern buildings close by old and decadent ones, both raising towards a polluted sky.
They exhibit hard lines, exuberant forms, shiny lights, but at the same time they lay a shadow on the lives crawling at their feet.
We are attracted by this shiny glitter, fascinated by its power.
What is the price to pay? Squeezed lives? Bent used bodies pushing carts loaded with black garbage bags? Boxes, containers destined to die?
How can such a gap between rich and poor exist?
What is the rule that makes it possible?
How can all this cruelty exist and thrive?
Men and women ruled by the delirium of time barely get by, side by side with luxury, power and indifference.
The actors in this play are real people.
Shown in these pictures once more as thinking human beings, capable of having feelings.
This selection of pictures is but a small portion of a series gathered by Enrico Gili in over two years of work.
It’s a mystery the power of art, capable of turning simple private stories into life examples.
An iconic city, today theatre of events that shape destinies, not only inside buildings but in the streets, a cycle were life and history are made.
This is the artist’s way to become storyteller, through the lens of a camera, calibrating the shutter, finding the balance in between life and shadow.
When a picture is taken, life freezes, becoming a piece of a story to tell the viewer.
