UNA is pleased to announce the continuation of its collaboration with Spazio Leonardo, the new space of Leonardo Assicurazioni -Generali Milano Liberazione, located in Porta Nuova.Curated by UNA, the program includes three solo exhibitions by Italian artists who will present a site-specific project for Spazio Leonardo’s gallery: Filippo Minelli(February-April 2019); Elia Cantori (in collaboration with the gallery CarDrde, May-September 2019); Stefano Serretta (October-December 2019).For the first exhibition,UNAbrings the project Across the Borderby Filippo Minelli (*Brescia,1983) to Milan.

The project was originally presented as part of the program for Manifesta12 -the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, at Palazzo Ajutamicristo in Palermo.-Filippo Minelli's work is part of many research areas that primarily concern the classic seventeenth-century theme of the landscape, expanded, revised and brought back in terms in which a political and historical discourse intersect. To this is added the survey on participatory models that led the artist to travel for ten years, meeting people and weaving a random network of performers, and producing and putting in circulation 44 flags, which form the project on show, Across the Border.

The artist defines his own research “Transnational Aesthetics” –able to connect the periphery to the global. This allows a creation of symbols and “iconic words” for new hypothetical nations conceived by a generation that no longer lives borders in a traditional way, but inhabits the world in fluid form.

This new aesthetic manifests itself on flags –the ideal terrain for identification and signaling –to become mediums for epiphany messages and neologisms: IODINE, a medicine to prevent thyroid cancer screamed on a flag of a small Belgian town close to a nuclear power plant; BELEAF, from Mumbai, written with the leaves of a felled tree that means resurrection, hope for the rebirth of a now tamed nature;HORMONES instead becomes a word play with “HOR-MONES”, then “horror”, mirror, according to the Lebanese activist, the horrors of the ruling class of the country.