DYNAMO: BICYCLES AGAINST BLACK OUT!

Ex 3, Firenze, Italy, 2010

Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy, 2011

Award winner as artist under 40, jury Adam Budak, Natalie Zomberg and Cristiana Perrella

The work is in the permanent collection of the Luigi Pecci Center in Prato 

The artist dedicated an entire project to Marshall Walter Taylor, the first African-American sportsman to win the title of world champion, in 1899. The project was entitled DYNAMO, and in it the history of the black cyclist who won every race despite physical and moral restrictions imposed by the prevailing racism, became a device for illuminating the exhibition space. Bicycles hidden behind a fake panel were used by African immigrants who, by pedalling, activated a dynamo, which produced the energy required to power the light in the room. The peripheral history of an instance of social emancipation was projected onto the unfolding of the show, where focusing attention on a minor subject resulted in the very existence of the exhibition event entering into a subtle relationship of dependence on the subjects – marginal in terms of their social condition – whose work made it possible. Here the dynamo was both an allusion to the bicycle as an instrument of possible degrowth for Illich, and the symbol of a small revolution which introduces social emancipation into a wider discourse spanning the creation ofenergy and the environment in which it is produced.