A Friend

From Tuesday, April 2, to Sunday, April 14, 2019, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents "A Friend", a monumental installation specially conceived for the two neoclassical tollgates of Porta Venezia by the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Tamale, Ghana), curated by Massimiliano Gioni. The site-specific installation is presented on the occasion of the Milanese Art Week, and during the Milan Design Week – Salone del Mobile.

Following Mahama’s large-scale interventions in various major international exhibitions— from the 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2015) to Documenta 14 (2017) in Kassel and Athens—the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has invited the artist to Milan to carry out an urban-scale installation at a key site in the city: the crossroads of Porta Venezia. This location is one of six main gateways in the ancient city walls and stands on the same axis as previously erected gates during the Roman, medieval, and Spanish eras.

For centuries, Porta Venezia has been known as Milan’s Oriental Gateway, marking the border that separated the urban fabric of the city from the countryside. Consequently, it is a place that has historically contributed to defining the topography of Milan and the relationship between the metropolis and the outside world. Chronicled throughout the city’s history—from the arrival of the plague, which devastated Milan with an epidemic in the seventeenth century, to its description in the pages of Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed”—the gateway remains one of the city’s most prominent landmarks, bordering the many multiethnic neighborhoods that surround it today.
“A Friend” aims to reflect on the very concept of the threshold—that place of passage defining inside and outside; one’s self and the other; the friend and the enemy.