Mario Cresci, MARIO CRESCI. SEGNI MIGRANTI, 2019

The title Segni Migranti can indicate in its semantic extension an acceptable binomial: it is the graphic trace of mark – drawing coexisting with the historical reality of the human condition, but also with that of the contemporary migrant.

Leaving a mark indicates the power of an action and of a convincing strong idea. In this sense the book is the container of stories in the form of marks and meanings, presenting itself as a personal and collective images archive that are the litmus tests of a work which is similar to a mirror where researches of meaning spread -following times and experiences lived in each social contexts, within the community and within things. All of this has allowed me, among other things, to understand and to know a reality as the area of Southern Italy -that at its beginning was foreign to me and unknown to me- where I found myself for the first time in the late sixties. The images of this archive of mine have accumulated on top of each other in a repository of sense addressed to the community in a continuous iconographic communication entrusted mainly to a vast production of posters and coordinated graphic projects, study of brands and logos for small and medium-sized craft enterprises, new magazines and photography books. This is the material we have revisited through thematic areas, similarities or analogies of various nature, avoiding a system of mere temporal classification and beyond, arriving page after page to the unpublished projects of 2020. This book is the result of the shared planning of a working group that has faced with me the task of studying a complex iconographic mosaic never analyzed before.

Mario Cresci