Francesca Marconi

Internazionale Corazon was born from Francesca Marconi’s encounter with the inhabitants of the district of Via Padova in Milan, a highly-heterogeneous area from a cultural point of view. The project consists of a series of portraits of people dancing in specially-made costumes modelled after those used for traditional “Caporales dances”, common in Milan in communities of Andean origin. Leveraging the energy of imagination and dance, the artist thus elaborates the theme of mestizaje and of an open and inclusive citizenship, using the city’s squares and streets as a platform.

For Marconi, “dancing the city” is an assertion of presence as well as a moment of encounter among communities, and doing so by using the urban territory as a stage is a way of narrating oneself in relation to the place, is telling a living urban body, which in turn comes alive with presences and activities, pulsating with desires and needs and, finally, is a way to feel the shared dimension of public space, understood as a dynamic and composite mix of individual experiences and potentialities. Marconi refers to such irreducible richness through her deeply-rooted and quintessentially public work.