Fondazione Puttana

The argument is in the name. To issue a manifesto, the genre of foundational claims for collective values, from a foundation that names itself with a slur is a form that contradicts itself, and the contradiction is the work. Fondazione Puttana borrows the full grammar of the contemporary institution: it announces itself across many surfaces at once (online platform, advertising video, printed gadgets, street posters) because that is how institutions now construct themselves, and the satire has to match that multi-surfacedness to land.

It was built to live in the wild, unmarked. For a passerby who does not stop, Fondazione Puttana is indistinguishable from the institutional advertising it imitates, and that indistinguishability is not a flaw but the trap. The pause to read is the work; the viewer who pauses, and then notices the slur inside the foundation's name, is the one who enters. The gallery's frame would have made it legible as art; the street refused that legibility on purpose, for the sake of operating inside the medium it set out to critique.

What survives is closer to a trace than to an event. The online platform, the work's centre of gravity, has been offline since 2019; the domain was let lapse, and the campaign now exists as photographic documentation only. A media intervention that loses its media trace becomes the description of a gesture rather than the gesture itself. This is also the only tactical-media work in the practice: the register demanded collaborative networks and ongoing upkeep one person could not sustain, and the turn that followed (toward landscape, material and installation) is the path this work did not take.

"To name an art-foundation satire after this figure without engaging the actual sex workers whose lives bear the term's everyday weight risks borrowing the offensiveness without paying its cost."

Critical review, 2026

The appropriation was strategic. The foundation names itself with the word its own practice deserves, redirecting the slur from the women on whom it ordinarily lands toward the institutional bodies the word more accurately describes. The intention does not undo the cost. Printed on pamphlets and circulated through Milan in 2016, a moment of particular legal-economic precarity for the city's sex workers, the work added one more circulation of a word those women already carry. I did not consult them, and I did not work alongside the organisations that represent them; the appropriation was from above. With distance it is the work's most uncomfortable failure. Remade now, the foundation would have to be named in collaboration with the people the original name harms.