“Soon there is no other language than that supplied by the commodities”
Based on this brief excerpt by W. F. Haug, the Cianfrusaglie project develops as a visual investigation into the theme of body migration through the lens of “things” or commodities. By retracing the production and commercial supply chain — from the extraction of raw materials to their transformation into waste — the work reflects on the material and symbolic traces that objects bear from the industrial process. It activates a poetic field of attention, where commodities emerge as signifying surfaces and repositories of traces of an ever-evolving economic and cultural system.
The project unfolds along two conceptual directions. On one hand, as a core-sampling operation within the micro-landscape of traces silently preserved by objects, it approaches migration through an archaeology of inter-relations between objects, exploring what is defined as “material handling”. On the other hand, Cianfrusaglie embarks on a “journey into code,” examining the semiotic migration of commodities — how objects detach from their use value to become representation, advertising images, and language. Here, photography acts as a “destabilizing device,” capable of revealing and desecrating the invisible grammar of commodities and consumption, triggering a process of deconstruction and resignification of what is seemingly insignificant and taken for granted.
In this play of semantic transformations, Cianfrusaglie illuminates a hidden universe that is nonetheless always in plain sight: a microcosm of “things” in constant migration, transforming and communicating, reflecting the codes of a consumerist society while simultaneously shaping desires and possibilities for self-fulfillment. Ordinary objects thus emerge as complex mirrors of the contemporary world, where industrial production, product aesthetics, and meaning intertwine.