NO WAY
BYRON GAGO
Bodies Farming · 2018
NO WAY is a site-specific intervention at Morel space, a former FIAT car garage in Ticino built in the late 1930s. The work responds to the place through its own construction vocabulary (PVC covering strips, an iron rafter, a reticular structure carrying plastic film across the pre-existing walls) and restores the surrounding walls and floor to the greyscale colour grid already found there. At the centre, a rectangle of four steel rails hangs from the ceiling on chains, two neon tubes along each rail: a chandelier assembled from industrial parts, lowering the hangar to the scale of a room someone might live in.
The garage is not a neutral shell. Morel was one of the first FIAT service stations in Ticino, opened in the late 1930s, inside the moment when FIAT was the industrial arm of Mussolini's modernisation project. The greyscale grid the work restores is the visual residue of that fascist industrial design. NO WAY keeps it rather than painting over it. To preserve the grid without captioning it is to leave the analysis to the visitor; the work's wager is that the building's own grammar, left legible, says more than a wall text would.
Keeping that grammar is the first move of the work's argument, not a failure of nerve. Galleries set inside repurposed industrial spaces usually treat the working past as backdrop: white-walled inserts, recessed light, the polite removal of labour from the room. NO WAY refuses that erasure. Holding on to the greyscale grid, the PVC entry strips and the worker-circulation logic of the FIAT garage is not nostalgia for industry; it is attention used as a refusal of imposition, a decision to read the space as a found text rather than to clear it for a new one.
The chandelier is where the argument turns. It is not, as the early text claimed, the reintroduction of human presence. The garage was always full of human presence, of FIAT labour and Ticino automotive life. The chandelier is the contradiction: a domestic, almost aristocratic object lowered into a workers' space, marking the gap between the histories the building had already lived and the new history that wanted to occupy it. In a garage built under fascism, it is the bourgeois interior arriving to ornament what fascism built: a quiet figure of post-fascist recuperation, hung on chains.
"The title 'NO WAY' is never connected to the work's spatial or conceptual logic. The title is the most present text in any installation context, yet its meaning is entirely withheld from the description."
Critical review, 2026
Fair. And the withholding now reads as silence rather than restraint. NO WAY is the colloquial refusal, the door closed, the impossible answer. But in Lugano in 2018, with Italy in the middle of one of its hardest immigration debates, "no way" was the political phrase of the moment, spoken by the new far-right and by the people refusing it alike. The title is that moment crossed by both directions: not no way through the space, but no way to the world the building was about to become. I kept the political reading back because it felt too direct; with distance I would name it.
NO WAY
2018
Final work
- Site-specific installation — former FIAT garage
- PVC · steel rails · neon · chains · plastic film
01 / 04
The work begins by reading the room. Rather than clearing the FIAT garage to a blank canvas, NO WAY treats it as a found text: the PVC entry strips are kept, a reticular structure carries plastic film across the existing walls, the greyscale grid is restored to what was already there, and the only wholly new object (the steel-rail-and-neon chandelier on its chains) is built from the same industrial register as the building it hangs in. The intervention is less an addition than a re-reading.
NO WAY is the earliest site-specific work in the practice, and it sits closer to the conventions of institutional critique (occupy an industrial space, install a light structure, demarcate a zone) than to the politically explicit installations that come later. That is not a weakness so much as a position in time: it is the formal rehearsal that made the denser, more declarative later work possible. Not a dead end, but the threshold that had to be crossed.
What survives from it is a method. The later installations would arrive with a fuller vocabulary that did not yet exist for the artist in 2018: bodies, breathing surfaces, inserted text. But the gesture NO WAY establishes carries through all of them: read a site's working past as something to keep, then cross it with a single contradiction sharp enough to make the keeping legible.
NO WAY
2018
Site / installation
- Site documentation
- Morel space · Ticino · 1930s FIAT garage
01 / 04
