9091
Super, Festival delle Periferie, Milan, 2018
Curator: Federica Verona
Artists: Giuseppe De Mattia, Veniero Rizzardi
9+0+9+1 attempts to reveal, through a sequence of 19 sketches and notes, the life of Milan’s 90/91 bus line—its passengers, the places it traverses, and the fragments of the city it weaves together along its circular route. The work offers a partial portrait, recorded on board at different moments of the day and later drawn onto paper during pauses in bars, gardens, or at bus stops.
These sketches, reconstructed from memory, serve as a discreet tool—a portrait without fixed objectives, an a posteriori process. They are the work of an author who has long relied on public transport to navigate the chaos of the city. For the first time, however, he boards not to reach a destination but to remain on the bus and observe: a voluntary prisoner of a space that allows one to move while seated, to witness fleeting fragments of existence over the course of just a few stops. He becomes a passenger-observer, suspended within the perpetual motion of the 90/91.