On the occasion of the eightieth Anniversary of the Liberation, the Casa della Memoria in Milan presents Pulci più di prima, ora, an exhibition in which artist Valerio Eliogabalo Torrisi engages in dialogue with the resistant archives, curated by Salvatore Cristofaro.

Part of the official program of the Municipality of Milan, Time of Peace and Freedom. Eighty Years of Liberation, the exhibition offers a poetic and civic reflection on the value of memory through the language of contemporary art.

Far from any rhetorical celebration, Pulci più di prima, ora is rooted in the archival materials preserved at the Casa della Memoria — in particular those of ANED (National Association of Former Deportees in Nazi Camps) and of the Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri — to give voice to submerged stories, forgotten bodies, letters and diaries that recount lives cut short yet unyielding in their dignity.

“I feel the fleas everywhere: on our bodies, on the words they use, on the polymorphic geographies we inhabit and would like to call home. […] I see fleas everywhere, more than before, now,” writes curator Salvatore Cristofaro in the curatorial text. It is from this image — taken from an anonymous diary of an interned soldier — that the exhibition takes shape: a condition of infestation that becomes a metaphor for the present, in which “extremisms become central nuclei of power” and the principles of resistance appear increasingly obscured by “nostalgic rites, resurfaced from the pulses of time.”

All the works on display are unpublished, the result of months of study and dialogue between the artist and archival documents. Torrisi worked closely with letters of those condemned to death, testimonies of deportees, accounts of confinement and clandestine lives. “Stories of warrior sisters, broken love stories that traveled on letters sewn onto the backs of strangers,” writes Cristofaro, intertwine in an exhibition path that restores dignity to the most fragile and radical gesture: to write, even when fingers are broken, in order to leave a trace, a farewell, a promise.

“What does it really mean to be a political artist?” asks Torrisi. “To exist, to walk down the street, to carry one’s person around, to occupy a space is already political. To speak, to use words, is political. And political are the works of any artist who lives in the contemporary.” A consciousness matured over time, which grew stronger when, invited to engage with the Resistance archives, he chose to focus on the “small stories of ‘ordinary people,’ since these are the true resistance — the one made of hidden notes, hastily written words, strategies devised in the back of a church.”

Pulci più di prima, ora is not only an exhibition, but a collective gesture, a celebration of memory that entrusts art with the task of safeguarding and relaunching the values of the Resistance. As Cristofaro states: “It is an exhibition that speaks of choirs, improvised choirs in the name of freedom, of resistance, of yesterday’s struggle for today, for a free, communal and resistant world. An archival exhibition: an archive of lives that continue to struggle, writing and singing to defend that freedom which eighty years ago was so hard won.”

Pulci più di prima, ora is thus a song: fragile and political, individual and choral. A plural work that entrusts art with the task of telling History through stories — without heroism, without rhetoric. As Torrisi concludes: “No longer single stories that matter, in the journalistic sense, but many small stories that create History. Many parts that together create a great narrative.”