Gianfranco Botto (Turin, 1963) and Roberta Bruno (Turin, 1966). They live and work in Turin, Italy

Gianfranco Botto (1963) and Roberta Bruno (1966), a.k.a. Botto & Bruno, a couple in life and in art from Turin is an artistic duo that, since the early 90s, has expressed itself mainly through photography, drawing, video and installations. Both born and raised in suburban neighbourhoods, thanks to their sophisticated culture, they have been able to treat marginalization as a cultural theme on which to intervene in order to probe it in all its aspects. Their visions of suburbs with dark skies are famous and unmistakable, characterized by abandoned buildings and degraded places, where the human presence has hardly conquered these places deprived from their identity, and where no physiognomy is recognizable. The two artists mainly use the camera as a mean of investigation: they take many images of the suburbs, their city and the places where they go to exhibit, or wherever they happen to be.

They choose mostly abandoned neighbourhoods and buildings, but not necessarily: warehouses, factories, schools and popular buildings. Through an entirely manual work (manual is also the process of making videos built on photographic sequences) they then create collages and new scenarios by freely juxtaposing details of the photographs. The work is thus the assembly of many places existing in reality which, however, finally seems to become a mental landscape, characterized by the lack of activity and inhabited mostly by one or two figures (the artists themselves) who never look the viewer in the face, but they turn their gaze to the ground. In the work of the artists, the abandoned industrial areas are approached with a melancholy but not resigned feeling. The characters, not visible in the face, are wrapped in a halo of relational autism that stands out under the post-atomic sky and a surreal but not unreal environment. The denunciation aspect and the lyrical aspect must in fact always go hand in hand. The task of the artists seems to be bringing to light the poetry that every place, even the most abandoned, carries with it.