Rogo Api

Rogo Api [Api Inferno] consists of two panels of plastic laminate reproducing headline posters from Italian newspapers. Api is the name of the company that owns a large oil refinery near Ancona. The headline announces the court decision concerning the disastrous fire at the refinery in 1999, which killed two workers: “Api Inferno. Top executives are acquitted, one worker is condemned”.

About Rogo Api

The Falconara Marittima oil refinery is located about twenty kilometers from where I live, between the sea and the railway. It is known to locals as “the Api”, from the name of the company that has always owned it. On 25 August 1999, a serious accident took place when a part of the refinery caught fire and two workers lost their lives. An investigation was launched and there was a trial. Some time later, in May 2005, I saw posters of the newspapers Messaggero and Corriere Adriatico on the street. They were very similar, displaying the same apodictic phrase edited just slightly differently. Both alluded to a scenario of possible social injustice while simultaneously referencing mythology through the title Rogo Api. The term rogo, in Italian, is not only suitable to describe a great fire, but it also bears further sacral meanings. Api is not only the acronym of an oil company (Anonima Petroli Italiana), but also the name of an Egyptian deity. I had the posters given to me.

Like daily newspapers, their posters are made to last a day. I decided to transform this moment into a memento, which had, if not the size, at least the durability of a monument. To achieve this, I used thick plastic laminate, which created a heavy, cold and solid block with sharp edges.

© Cristiano Berti

2024

Berti’s work takes possession of the billboards, highlighting the paradoxical contrast between the volatility of them, destined to become scrap paper in a number of hours, and the social and political weight of the news they bear. In this specific case it is a headline from 2005, the verdict of the case regarding the accident that happened in 1999 at the Api refinery in Falconara, where two workers lost their lives and hundreds of residents had to leave their homes following a fire inside the plant. Berti’s work transformed the billboards into rigid plastic panels destined to last, to keep the headline about a worker being sentenced for the accident and the acquittal of Api’s board of directors. There is no direct judgement or interpretation in the work, but the artist’s gesture to keep the headline current and the potential to disseminate it forces us not to digest the message of the title in mere seconds, rather, it makes us re-propose it, ask ourselves about the event. This work therefore marks the transition of the Api fire from an event to history, from news to collective memory, in a radical quality upgrade that takes on the role of a civic admonition.

© 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, p. 155