ADD
BYRON GAGO
Red Circle · 2015
ADD reactivates a gesture by Gino de Dominicis: a vinyl sign reading CHE COSA C'ENTRA LA MORTE? (what does death have to do with it?), which he carried in a 1971 photograph by Massimo Piersanti. Over twenty-four hours, with people met for the first time in Milan, the question was walked across the city: from Piazza del Duomo at its geometric centre, through Cordusio, Cairoli, Moscova and Garibaldi, ending at the piazza of the Cimitero Monumentale, before the Famedio. The act asked of each participant was a score borrowed from the factory strike: to walk forward, then backward, holding the sign high. The video holds these fragments of individual strike in a multicultural frame.
The work is not homage, and it is not appropriation; the closest word is reactivation, picking up a gesture made in 1971 and walking it across a different city to find what is still alive in it. Cosa c'entra la morte? in the Milan of 1971 was a question about meaning in a moment of political collapse. The same phrase in the Milan of the 2010s, a city that had become a staging ground for the migration deaths of the central Mediterranean and for the fast evictions of Stazione Centrale, asked something else. The phrase did not change; the city it travels through did. The work is the difference between the two readings.
The backward walk is the formal addition that names that difference. De Dominicis carried the sign forward, toward the audience; here it is walked backward, in pairs, through six sites: gesturally a recession, a withdrawal from the question while still carrying it. The sign faces the carriers, not the spectators: the question is turned toward the bodies holding it. What the video records is what passers-by do when they meet a question they cannot read, addressed to people they cannot see. That asymmetry is the political content of the piece.
The Italian is kept untranslated on purpose. To render c'entra as "what does death have to do with it" is to moralise what the Italian deflates: c'entra carries a colloquial shrug, death as inconvenience, an interruption to the programme. And the carriers were a mix: Italian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Filipino, Peruvian. Several of them walked a sentence they did not speak in their own language. The question circulating in a tongue not all of them shared is part of what the work argues: that the language of the country you move through is itself a question you cannot fully answer.
"Is this homage, critique, reclamation, or appropriation? The work does not articulate its position relative to the precedent."
Critical review, 2026
It is none of those, quite: the closest word is reactivation. I picked up de Dominicis's gesture not to honour it and not to claim it, but to walk it across a changed city and find out what is still alive in the question. The phrase stayed the same; what had changed was Milan, and the work is the distance between what the sign meant then and what it means now.
ADD
2015
Final work
- Video — HD, stereo sound, 5'36"
- Relational performance · six Milan sites
01 / 04
The work is a line drawn through the city. The walk is a score borrowed from the factory strike: forward, then backward, the sign held high, carried in pairs. The route runs from Piazza del Duomo, at Milan's geometric centre and before its church, through Cordusio, Cairoli, Moscova and Garibaldi, to the piazza of the Cimitero Monumentale and the Famedio, the shrine of the city's honoured dead. The question is carried from the living centre to the threshold of the dead, and the distance between them is walked, not argued.
The sign comes from Gino de Dominicis: a phrase he held in a 1971 photograph by Massimo Piersanti. ADD does not reproduce that image; it reactivates its gesture, carrying the same question into another decade and another Milan. The reference is the starting point, not the subject.
The video is not a neutral record. Hours of footage were cut down, the edit foregrounding the moments where passers-by looked, paused, asked, or refused. That selection is a second authorship the work performs over its participants, and naming the cut, rather than hiding it inside the word "document", is part of keeping the work honest about its own hand.
ADD
2015
Route / document
- Performance documentation
- Six sites · forward / backward walk
01 / 02
