All Photos by Filippo Minelli
In Italian graffiti artist Filippo Minelli’s “Contradictions” series, he makes it clear that there’s become a growing disconnect with today’s youth culture and social networking and the reality of everyday life. Discovered on our favorite graffiti and street art site Wooster Collective are the images that Filippo has created in various third world countries by spray painting the words of social networks, technology, and tools of communication that we take for granted. By being placed in such environments, he brings to life the contradictions of how we communicate today. This is what Filippo said about his on-going “Contradictions” exhibition:
“Myspace”, Paint on wall, Phnom Penh-Cambodia
“All my “Contradictions” ongoing project has the same motivation/meaning. Technologies and the marketing behind them usually push the almost religious aspect of their evolution, as also said by Leander Kaheny in his “Cult of Mac” book, and the users are pushed to live in an intense way the abstraction from reality, living technologies only as an idea and sometimes without even knowing their real functions. And this aspect works for the social-networks too. The idealization connected with these experiences provokes a small-but-important detach of the perception of reality and what I want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies. It’s a kind of reminder, for people like me which I’m an Apple user and also have social-network accounts that the real world is deeply far from the idealization we have of it, not only in the third world and even if technologies and globalization are good things. I hope it’s clear and sorry for my italian-english.”
“Facebook” spray paint on scrap-yard, Bamako – Mali, 2008
“Flickr” Paint on wall, Phnom Penh-Cambodia
“Microsoft” Paint on barrels, Bamako-Mali. 2008
