Enzo Comin has started working on the project entitled “Cant-ieri” over a year ago. “Cant-ieri” is an attempt to rehabilitate and reconstruct through artistic gesture certain areas, or, more specifically, the dilapidated shipyard (cantiere) of the Monfalcone town in the North-astern Italy. As the artist himself notes, these ruins symbolize the global economic crisis started at the end of the previous decade and still continuing today. After photographing the formerly active buildings of strategic importance that were consequently destroyed during the World War II, Enzo Comin attempts to “rehabilitate” them by placing new pictorial images on the surface of the photographs, thus, artificially renovating the ruined objects. This gesture tends to the “positive”, symbolizing rehabilitation and reconstruction, in contrast with the current crisis. Initially, being cursorily informed about the consumer and re-urbanization processes started at the end of 1990s in Yerevan, Enzo Comin’s one-month visit to Yerevan and the implemented research allowed him to conceive the true nature of the local “progressive” processes of re-urbanization, “remodernization”.
Processes that in the eyes of many citizens and the artist in particular were violating the basic principles of urban planning and organization (irrelevant planning of buildings, extermination of green zones, gentrification, etc.).
Enzo Comin’s attempt to continue the project “Cant-ieri” in Yerevan, which was initiated a month ago, refers to the fate of the city inhabitants. The artist uses photographic images of Yerevan’s past inhabitants to overlay them on the images of new buildings and sights of today’s Yerevan, thereby reviving memories about the city, where the physical traces of the city’s past are being gradually removed, and the material evidence reassuring our memories is only available through photographs.
The visual “narrative” of this series of works is implemented in the mode of painting-photography and poetic manner, though the project’s connotative accompaniment is a reexamination of urban matters, it is socially engaged and refers to the crucial and topical issue of commercial rearrangements of Yerevan city with distorted and fateful results for local peoples..
Many wonder how art can serve the social policies aiming at decriminalization and fair resolution of social and corruption issues. Thus, even though such forms of autonomous art might not be able to solve any issues, they still can spread “…civil conduct, self-improvement, local pride”, and this is visible in the case of prominent expressions of civil activism in today's Yerevan.
