Prestige

Prestige is an installation consisting of six bags lost on Italian trains, which have been kept as they were found at the time of discovery, sealed by the Italian State Railways Company.

About Prestige

Prestige is the first of a small group of works that make use of everyday and used objects, exploiting their story-evoking potential.

The idea of ​​collecting a group of luggage lost on trains came to me after reading an article in La Stampa, the newspaper of my city, which described an auction of this type of object. At that time the railways, after having stored unaccompanied luggage for a certain time, announced a public auction, in which mostly pensioners and small street vendors participated. The luggage was put up for auction after being inspected to eliminate any perishable food products, and then sealed. The auction participants could infer the value of the contents only from the outside – they were working with their imagination. Whoever acquired the lot had the opportunity to feel like a child again for a moment, as if faced with a wrapped present: a situation that I found enchanting, especially if they were truly mature or even elderly people. I then contacted the State Railways to find out when the next auction would be, but they told me that there would no longer be an auction. Instead, they were donating the lost items to the Municipality, who would then decide what to do with them. I asked if I could buy some of the luggage that was in stock and they agreed.

These six objects, sealed with lead, took the collective name of Prestige from the writing that appears on the closing strap of one of them. It is a title with an ironic twist, given that it is a fairly modest suitcase.

© Cristiano Berti

2024

Re-presenting the suitcases to the public as a work, they rise to depersonalised, ready-made objects that carry stories that are unknown and lost over time. Without an identity, an owner, a destination or any other value for their use, the six pieces of luggage of Prestige become the directors of a dumbfounded mystery, concentrating all of the unease of silent and disoriented objects, that have been unanchored from any function, and mirror of the uselessness of their presence. Only the signs of the previous owner’s use remain – signs of untraceable itineraries of past train trips – and the official seals of the auction certifying the preserved inaccessibility of the contents. Prestige is a paradoxical scenography, a work that inaugurates Berti’s interest for second-hand objects, as catalysts of events, actions and circumstances etched into its skin that are no longer verifiable.

© Luigi Fassi

excerpt from «The Vertigo of Reality », in Cristiano Berti. Vertigine del Reale/Vertigo of Reality, exhibition catalogue, Turin: Allemandi (ISBN 978-88-422-2104-3), 2012, pp. 151 – 152