Filippo Berta
(Treviglio, Italy, 1977)

Gente Comune, 2021


Diasec, 6 works
25 x 50 cm each
[Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, © ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy Pascale Marthine Tayou and GALLERIA CONTINUA, by SIAE 2021]


Filippo Berta’s artistic research reveals the social tensions provoked by the relationship between individuals and the relative societies they belong to.

The photographs and the video Gente Comune ponder the phenomenon of physical walls, a geopolitical symbol of the 21st century, which is further strengthened thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, eventually discovering that there are another 70 demarcation lines that cannot be crossed in the world. From 2015 to 2021, the artist crossed Eastern Europe (Hungary, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Turkey, North Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria), to arrive in America (the United States and Mexico), and, lastly, Asia (South Korea), making videos and producing participatory actions involving the inhabitants of the border areas, asking them to count out loud, and in their own language, the sharp points in the barbed wiring. The action, replicated on eight country borders in which hundreds of kilometers of walls interrupt the land, denounces the search for an impossible result: the inability to glimpse an end, a utopian count repeated ad infinitum that expands between space and time, past and future, not allowing for the end of this phenomenon to be predicted. 

Filippo Berta lives and works in Bergamo. He exhibited at MADRE Museum of Naples, MSU Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, at Museion Contemporary Art Museum of Bolzano, Jönköpings Läns Museum, at Staedtischegalerie of Bremen, State Museum of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniky, Pori Art Museum, Victoria Art Center of Bucharest, Center for Cultural Decontamination, CZKD, Belgrade, Matadero Centro Creativo Contemporaneo, Madrid, MAO Museum of Architecture and Design of Slovenia. He participated in the Thessaloniki Biennale (4th and 6th editions), Curitiba Biennale (34th edition), Prague Biennale (V Edition) and the Moscow Biennale for Young Art (3rd edition). In 2015 he won the MIA Foundation Award, Bergamo; in 2014 he won the Maretti Award Habana and he was the finalist of the Talent Prize in Rome.