Sweet Home

Sweet Home is a double slide projection, with one projection presenting fifteen Italian living rooms, and the other showing the diagrams of the chemical and radioactive situation of the same rooms.

About Sweet Home

I conceived Sweet Home after Filippo Maggia invited me to participate in the Da Guarene all’Etna exhibition. I had recently discovered that there was a radioactive gas, radon, present everywhere – albeit in very different concentrations – which in some cases could represent a serious danger to health. In a domestic environment the gas tended to concentrate the more its dispersion was prevented. This meant that the very houses that seemed to best protect their inhabitants from the dangers of the outside were transformed into traps.

Radon is invisible, and it can only be identified with special devices and systems, making us aware of how our perception of reality is very limited. Prof. Paolo Volpe from the University of Turin explained to me the simplest method in order to carry out this analysis and obtain diagrams from it. He could not provide me with the detectors (they were sent to me from the USA), but he could carry out the analyses in the university laboratory and produce diagrams. These demonstrated the presence of radon and other pollutants in the environment.

I took the title of the exhibition almost literally, planning a trip around Italy in fifteen stages, which began in Zafferana Etnea. I chose to visit villages or small towns. Inside the houses I chose the living room; a comfortable place, often well furnished and made to welcome visitors.

The work is presented as a double projection: on one side are the photographs of the living rooms and on the other the diagrams. The mechanical clicks of the changing slides add an auditory element while looking at them. The two series of images are coupled asynchronously, to avoid the association between a specific place and the detection of pollution levels. The title evidently plays on the ambiguity caused by this double vision.

© Cristiano Berti

2024

Meticulous images of warm elegant interiors, with a fine burning fireplace, old wood furniture, leather armchairs and sofas, carefully studied lighting and beams visible on the ceilings, breathtaking outside views that invade the room. In a moment the room could come alive, we might see babies crawling across a red carpet and their young mothers running after them worried about these sticky little fingers, or else a greying gentleman sipping a brandy while reading the business insert from newspaper or leafing through a catalogue of antiques for the next auction. These are photographs that are certainly worthy of a glossy English magazine on country homes, if it were not for those strange, worrying graphics that appear on the side, and, once deciphered, they reveal that under the parquet or running alongside the chimney, hidden and sinuous lies radon, a gas that is certainly not good for the health nor the security of one of the few certainties of life: the home ‘Home sweet home’.

© Filippo Maggia

«Cristiano Berti: Sweet Home», in GE/03. Da Guarene all’Etna – 03, exhibition catalogue, Milan: Nepente (ISBN 88-88900-01-2), 2003, p. 8