Corpi di reato

Corpi di reato [Burglary Tools] consists of four groups of burglary equipment and other tools used by thieves caught committing offences, seized by the police, purchased at a court auction.

About Corpi di reato

I purchased the four lots of items that form Corpi di reato [Burglary Tools] at a judicial auction. Items that have been seized from people intent on committing crimes are generally resold as items of lawful use once the case is closed. Only weapons and tools made for malintent are excluded from this procedure, and very often they are destroyed. One of the lots that I was sold at the auction that took place on July 5th, 2005, ran by the Court of Turin, would certainly have been destroyed if I had not convinced the court clerk that those objects would be used for a work of art. This lot consisted of long, massive crowbars, as well as some awls. Another lot that I bought included a bicycle and a backpack full of tools, a find that eloquently shows the modesty of the means available to those caught in the act.

© Cristiano Berti

2024

A backpack, a bag and tools for breaking and entering are presented alongside a bicycle – a racing bike that has been partially adapted for use in the city with a carrier and a fender. The set of orphaned objects, as if they too, like their last owners, were being detained as punishment, Corpi di reato recalls a neorealist scene set in the new millennium, the image of an Italy that is worn out, made of precarious survival and lack of prospects. But it is also a didactic tableau, an anthropomorphic composition, almost a nativity scene celebrating the re-birth of these objects, where the act of the auction provides them with a possible redemption, a new, unexpected existence.

© 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. 152

Berti’s research does not concern the private sphere, doesn’t draw from his personal history, nor from the literary and the romantic world, but seems to be the obsessive record of fragments of lives with a taste for the noir.

In Corpi di reato, Berti lessens his interference between the object and the work of art by exhibiting pure “ready made” tools once used to burgle, steal, escape. A bicycle – which from as far back as Duchamp to Cattelan has a long standing history – a rucksack and an electric torch, 20 rubbish bags, a nail-clipper, a crowbar, chisels and various tools have been arranged on pedestals in the exposition area.

The objects that Berti uses in this work come from and have in actual fact been used in real burglaries. He, infact, buys those tools in judicial auctions. The way he purchases and takes possession of them I think it’s a very meaning element of his making art. He draws an imaginary story that is never really revealed.

The mystery chains the imagination deriving from the events directly to the objects, which takes us in an obsessing curiosity of how, who, and why these tools were used.

© Laura Garbarino

excerpt from Corpi di reato, exhibition leaflet, Macerata: Fuorizona Artecontemporanea, 2005