"The original installation was made in october 2009 for the Slash/Paper under the knife exhibi tion at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. The exhibition was pointing out those artist, all over the world, who were working with pa per by folding, cutting or sticking it. Among all those artists, were standing out such names as Kara Walker, Tom Friedman, Olafur Eliasson. Of course, I was the most unknown and so the curator gave me the last remaining spot, the one that nobody wanted: the ceiling of the museum’s entrance. Since I had never made a work on a ceiling, I took a look around, pretty puzzled: the museum, that was only just built, was born exactly at the Columbus Circle entrance, in front of Cristoforo Colombus’ statue, and in that mo ment I remembered what a couple of south ame ricans I met in my New York’s coming and going told me. Columbus for us and for U.S.A. is a sort of hero, but for them he’s an infamous one, who brought them nothing but ruin, preparing the way to spanish domination and to the extermi nation of the indigenous peoples. This inverted vision of History made me think that: why not actually inverting history, hanging it to the ceiling of the museum? So I thought back to Benigni and Non ci resta ceh piangere, where he and Troisi, catapulted back in time, are planning to stop Columbus and to prevent him from discovering America because, in the end, as they say, from America nothing good came. Imagining a paper storm (white like the pages of an erased book that has to be written again), I built a paper version of the Santa Maria that, f looding in ripped piece of paper, sinks in the museum ceiling before reaching the coasts of El Salvador, wrecking with Columbus itself and his crew. While I was making this project – I remember that it was summer and in Italy was decided not to help the illegal immigrants boats, letting them sink off the sicilian coasts. This matter made me think of a counterpart of the Santa Maria shipwreck: a three-dimensional representation, of course made of ripped paper – but now it was black – of the Medusa (the one of the famous Géricault raft) that, in spite of the historical truth, reaches its destination without sinking. I should have made this installation for the Foley Gallery, as well in New York, side by side with the Museum of Arts and Design exibi tion, but the life, you know, takes roads that you would never expect, and so during a love crisis I decided to make for the gallery a frieze about love (Love is a four letter word) 15 metre long. But this is another tale."
Andrea Mastrovito in EASY COME EASY GO, exhibition catalogue, Silvana Editore, 2011