Telamone
BYRON GAGO
Red Circle · 2015
A minute rear-projection shows a fixed-camera shot in loop. The framing is constructed frontally to one of the marble benches along the stairs of Milano Centrale station, showing a sleeping man on it. The images juxtapose two temporalities: the monumentality of the architecture that holds the sleeping man in a statuary dimension, and the rapid nomadism of passers-by through the station. A time suspended in loop, where the transitory, the velocity and the immobile establish a precarious regime.
The title names a bearing-figure. The classical telamon supports the architrave with raised arms; the modern telamon sleeps beneath the architrave because the city has nowhere else to put him. The irony is structural. This too is a telamone, and the building is also held up by his exhaustion. Milano Centrale produces real monuments: architectural figures of labour, of progress, of fascist civic identity. The work asks the bench-as-marble-element to produce another kind of figure.
The frame protects nothing. It does not shield the body from view. It focuses: it isolates the body from the surrounding circulation and gives it a rectangle of space the rest of the station does not. The frame is a small architectural gesture that says this body deserves a frame. The viewer can read this as elevation or as exposure; both readings are operative, and the work does not resolve them.
The silence is a refusal of the station's soundscape: announcements, footsteps, voices. It is a small negative space inside the audible building: the body sleeps in a silence the actual station never has. The silence is the dream-condition of rest the actual rest could not enjoy.
"A sleeping body is recorded, looped, and displayed. This raises questions of consent, privacy, and the spectacularization of vulnerability that the work does not address."
Critical review, 2026
The critic places the ethics first, and rightly so. The man's consent I did not have at the moment of recording, and this is the work's most uncomfortable truth. The work was a necessary mistake. Its presence in the archive is the record of what I learned from making it. The later works operate under different rules precisely because Telamone taught me what those rules need to be.
Telamone
2015
Final work
- Video installation (loop, silent)
- Projector · cotton · spruce battens · 19 × 13 cm
01 / 02
The site is the work. Milano Centrale governs who may rest, where, and for how long: a logic of circulation, productivity and movement that the sleeping body interrupts. The footage was shot frontally to a marble bench in the central concourse, then edited and projected back into a minimal frame placed before the same bench: cotton canvas stretched over spruce battens, set vertically on the ground.
By the time the projection was installed the bench was empty. The man had moved on, or been moved on. The work is the projection of a prior presence into the space of its absence, in the precise location where the absence was produced. It makes visible the structural condition the station otherwise keeps invisible: who is allowed to occupy public space at rest.
Telamone has not been exhibited since 2021. The decision has been quiet rather than articulated, but it is becoming articulate: the work was early and urgent, and it prioritised the political legibility of the gesture over the ethical ground of how it was made. Its place is the archive, the record of what the work taught, rather than the wall.
Telamone
2015
Site / research
- Process documentation
- Milano Centrale · back-projection frame
01 / 01