Curated by Fortunato D’Amico

Franco Perrotti’s Dissuader has the physiognomy of a pigeon. It is a monumental sculpture suspended above our heads that stirs the fears of our thoughts, increasingly confused and fragmented, in an era of tensions and uncertainties about the future of humanity.
Its steel spikes draw a rigorous pattern that evokes grids, fences and containment structures. The surface becomes a relief map, a network of lines and points where passages, stops, and interrupted trajectories are deposited.
It is a sword of Damocles that interweaves the artistic dimension with political reflection on the impeded crossing of borders by many governments.
The Dissuader has multiple references in the deterrence instruments implemented globally by many governments. Physical barriers, walls and fences, pushback agreements, control policies that hinder access and circulation. In a world where forced migrations involve over 122 million people and where barriers continue to multiply, the work highlights the paradox of increasingly rigid borders in the face of human mobility that does not cease, driven by the search for security and better living conditions. Dissuaders are the instruments of new racisms that hinder encounters between peoples.
While in many contexts the pigeon may be bothersome to humans due to its presence, it remains a figure linked to peace, migration and new beginnings, which concentrates within itself the tension between the desire for movement and control devices, transforming into a sign capable of questioning our present.
The sculptural body of Franco Perrotti’s Dissuader, an archetype that crosses the city, flies over streets, buildings, facades, absorbs the stories of human beings stratified in architectures and artifices accumulated and codified in different languages on the skin of the territory.
Suspended high above, it is a poetic and structural entity that relates the observer’s gaze to urban space and its fractures. The elevated position recalls the freedom of flight, but at the same time makes perceptible the limits imposed on those who cannot cross with the same lightness and transforms space into a critical place.

Biography