Bovisa, an area on the north-west outskirts of Milan: perhaps not everybody knows that at the Romany camp in via Barzaghi, prior to eviction they danced around a fire deep into the night. Perhaps not everybody knows that the neighbourhood that hundreds of polytechnic students cross every day with their plaster models under their arms, thirty years ago was an industrial area. Perhaps not everybody knows that the favourite pastime of many pensioners in the Bovisasca is tending their illegal allotments, just like many don’t know that abandoned garages can become improvised cult locations.
Elvio Annese knew it and filmed it.
His pilgrimage around the spaces left empty by the city began in 1976 when he was presented with his first 8 mm camera that he used to film the dumps and the rubble of industrial Bovisa: “I was a young boy when I made my first films, using Super 8, in one of these abandoned factories. It was like an industrial Pompei. Everything suddenly stopped. I went back there years later”. Ten years later, when he came across the films in his parents’ cellar, he came up with the idea of making a documentary and returned to the places to film how they had changed. The early shots in Super 8 are blended seamlessly with the VHS ones of the 1980s and the more recent ones in MiniDV and the history of the area unfolds, measured across these changing supports.
It is a story told in images, more eloquent than rivers of words, of a city that many live with but that at the same time many ignore. What Annese offers us is an unexpected Milan, illegal, unauthorised, but live and pulsating. The city read between the lines of the city. GG

For information about the documentary write to: nomendoc@fastwebnet.it