ISO (Innobiliare Sud Ovest) Un-real Estate
2019-2023 (in progress)
— Innobiliare Sud Ovest (ISO) is a fictitious and eccentric real estate agency that puts up for sale common goods that should already belong to citizens, adopting the communicative rhetoric of the real estate market.
Innobiliare Sud Ovest is an artistic and social operation sub specie ludi that has received the Patronage of Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee in Naples.
The ISO stand at the entrance to the art fair, Verona, 2019 Ph. © Skymind Images
The ISO stand at the entrance to the art fair, Verona, 2019 Ph. © Skymind Images
"An iNNobiliare* agency, which, behind the guise of a traditional real estate sale, intercepts the not-so-noble practices of selling real estate that would already be ours. In other words, it’s a critical work, although in parodic tones, on the spectacular rise of the private sphere as the sole public interest".
(Chiara Zocchi, writer, journalist and communications officer at the agency Innobiliare Sud Ovest)
*From an apparently futile play on words in Italian between Immobile (real estate) and Innobile (what is not noble, therefore degraded).
"Giovanni Scotti starts from a photographic campaign in the Bagnoli district of Naples, following a path derived from the tradition of the Italian landscape school, placing his territory of investigation among the world capitals of de-qualification.
As a direct continuation of this production, the artist hybridizes its gender identity, rereading it in the communicative language of the real estate market.
Intuition and sensitivity have pushed Scotti to overcome the classic production canon of the art system , which too often contains the work in an elitist exchange dynamic. The agency Innobiliare Sud Ovest organizes in this sense a form of horizontal participation in the artist's work. It re-adapts its expressive code, uses play and parody, starting with its own marketing, to trigger renewed procedures of participation and social activation. It is no coincidence that the first physical location was inaugurated with the collaboration of the Edenlandia Amusement Park , inside the park itself".
(Ernesto Tedeschi, writer, editor and advertising manager at the agency Innobiliare Sud Ovest)
"One cannot understand Innobiliare Sud Ovest without first falling headfirst into the trap of the landscape. It’s as if the panoramic view was invented here, on the hills of Naples, above terraces that are nests built with the threads of silence. Innobiliare hands over the weapons of perception. It declares that seeing, in itself, is unsustainable".
(Ernesto Tedeschi)
Giovanni Scotti, ISO T 003, 2021
Innobiliare Sud Ovest advertising campaign, 6x3 3D anglyph billboard (ISO AD campaign 001), Naples, 2020
Innobiliare Sud Ovest (An Un-real Estate Agency). The speculative paradox of the spectator
"It is the phase of the modesty of consciousness"
(F. Nietzsche)
Innobiliare Sud Ovest is an artistic practice of intermediation between public and (de)private(d) space.
It operates in the context of the private ability to conceive the political discourse, that is the logos that establish the democratic research of the public good.
Giovanni Scotti's project was born in 2015, from a photographic campaign on the landmarks of the Bagnoli landscape, in Naples - the Costanzo Ciano complex, former NATO command; the former Italsider area and the Parco dello Sport - that ascribe the historical working-class neighborhood of the city to a spectral model of dequalification of public property. It is a photography hauntologically haunted by the no longer of a lost future. From the edge of abandonment, the artist decides to return his individual consciousness as a spectator of ruins, in the form of a real estate transaction.
At the end of 2019, Scotti's images thus take on the body of a real estate ad, in the space of Innobiliare Sud Ovest, the first real estate agency of the common good. Asking photography to emphasize itself as a body is the nonsense of Innobiliare Sud Ovest: a heterotopia of illusion that compensates for the illusion of the reality.
Innobiliare Sud Ovest therefore serves the primordial function of public space: that of revealing the fracture lines existing within our society and contributing to recomposing them, because "by dint of contemplating, one stops feeling and thinking".
(Ernesto Tedeschi)
