TORNATINTA
translation: ‘The Return of Colour’
2023

fabric flags
10 x 70cm x 240cm

part of Playing Ground project at BASE, Milan, IT

Funded by Fondazione Maurizio Fragiacomo, with a
contribution from Statens Kunstfond 

Flags are loaded objects, they represent and communicate, symbolising a place in its absence. This series of flags is a proposal to imagine Milan differently. What could it look like? How could it work? How might it smell and feel?

In project workshops we explored the childrens favourite parks; they took photographs and made observational drawings and rubbings of textures. The children used these materials to design buildings and flags for a future Milan, which inspired their writing about the future city, what it might turn into and what they would change or make happen.

Their ideas consistently returned to the climate crisis, their experience of its effects in the present and their anticipation of its future reality.

Their writing became the title of each flag, ranging from the surreal to the practical. The flag designs were inspired by these texts and used material from the workshops. They develop and respond to the childrens design ideas, where the discarded confetti turns into snakes, flowers form tower blocks, tree shadows are moons and cars fall like leaves.

If these were the flags for a future Milan, imagine the city that they might represent.

The children suggested ‘Tornatinta’ as a title for the work, an invented word in Italian, which could be loosely translated as ‘The Return of Colour’.