E' da stesi che si vedono le nuvole

What if we didn’t always need to hold up the world, but could simply let ourselves be touched by the clouds?

“we raise our feet even an inch above the ground (…) we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. (…) able to look around, to look up – to look, for example, at the sky” On being Ill | Virginia Woolf

What if we didn’t always have to hold up the world, but simply let ourselves be touched by the clouds? This question arises from a reflection on adolescence as a time when, often unknowingly, one inhabits a posture different from that of adulthood: lower, more oblique, more vulnerable.

Created between 2024 and 2025 in Sesto San Giovanni, a city in Lombardy historically known as the “Manchester of Italy,” E' da stesi che si vedono le nuvole is rooted in a territory marked by a strong industrial identity and a long tradition of workers’ struggles. The Carroponte, a monumental structure once used to lift steel, has today been transformed into a cultural space, hosting concerts and nighttime performances.

Yet it is during the day that this place reveals something invisible: it empties, quiets down, and un veils a more intimate dimension. Lying on the grass, leaning against the edges of an empty stage, scattered among silent corners, these bodies seem to abandon the vertical axis of performance, seeking another posture: one closer to others, more attentive. Capable of tracing a shared geography, much like nature does under the sky.

The investigation of the place and its current inhabitants, attempts to build a bridge with memory: an echo of the workers’ history that can find a new language, revealing a silent, personal resistance that dialogues with the collective past, in search of a different inclination.

Author’s voice

I was born and raised in Sesto San Giovanni, once called the “Manchester of Italy,” though I know its history mostly through the stories of my grandparents, who spent their entire lives working in its factories.

As always, it is the encounter with reality that shows us the way.

It was while looking back at the portraits of the girls and boys I had photographed that I realized what needed to be told. I observed their attitudes: oblique, leaning, reclined bodies.

These images brought me back to Virginia Woolf. In her essay On Being Ill, she describes the postures imposed by illness as a possibility of desertion from the “army of the upright,” a way of realizing that we are still able “... to look around, to look up, to look, for instance, at the sky.” I began to wonder if these adolescent postures might also be a form of resistance to the constant demand for performance imposed by the adult world. Because there truly is a kind of silent desertion in the simple act of lying down to watch the clouds— as if, for a moment, we could free ourselves from the burden of always having to hold up the world.

I started to think of these presences as a form of resistance, capable of questioning our ways of inhabiting space and relationships. I conducted interviews to gather their stories and began a research project (still ongoing) in the archives of the ISEC Foundation [Institute for the History of the Contemporary Age], exploring texts and photographs linked to the industrial boom periodto trace postures and words that evoke verticality, in an attempt to build a bridge between the collective memory of the past and the gestures of the present.

Working on the politics of posture, for me, is a way to return to the question I asked myself the very first day I saw them— a question that has since become the core of this research: What if it were not always necessary to hold up the world, but simply to let ourselves be touched by the clouds?