A-side
“Private collection of the obsolete“. Italy, Early 2021
There are probably only a few pay phone left on the streets of your city, just as few landline phones are in homes or for sale in stores. This pictured is a Digito model payphone, which has been around since 2002, a year after the payphone with tokens was made obsolete. Encounters like these are becoming rare: public telephones operator intend to keep the pay phones only in key places, such as hospitals, stations and airports.
I have set up inside one of these telephone booths, now like an urban memorabilia, a small collection of completely (or almost) obsolete objects that have been part of my daily life between two centuries, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Coins and banknotes have been made obsolete by the Euro; telephone agendas by the mobile phones; floppy disks, cassettes and even CDs from mp3 files. Some objects, such as the Alitalia frequent traveler’s card, no longer exist together with Alitalia itself. Carbon paper has become progressively useless thanks to digital copying systems. The physicality of this space is itself out of time, because it is totally disused in an urban context, where the 4e 5G technology allows each of us to exchange very complex data (4k videos, streaming).
“Private collection of the obsolete” intends to be a place where space-time barriers are overcome; a refuge preserved from progress where one can immerse oneself in other temporal dimensions.
