<< What do you mean by country, Mr. Minister? A group of unhappy?

We plant wheat but we don’ t eat white bread. We cultivate the wine, but we don’t drink the wine. We breed animals, but we don’t eat meat.

Nonetheless you are recommending not to leave our homeland. But  is a homeland the land where you can not live of their work? »Homens sem paz, Civilização Brasileira, 1972

Wop is pleased to announce  “Paisà” a collective exhibition of Italians resident in the city of New York City.

The initiative takes its name from the word "Paisan"  First used by Italian immigrants in the 19th Century and 20th Century.

These immigrants came mainly of Southern Italy, in most cases spoke the local dialect of their region and sought housing in neighborhoods where they had established their own countrymen, the above mentioned "Paisan”".   

Subsequently, with the occupation of southern Italy by the Allies during the Second World War, the term was used as a nickname  by soldiers Italian Americans to refer to Italian civilians.

 

The project is created in order to represent the new Italian immigration in the US. The initiative provides for the allocation of a bag for every artist, referring to the famous "cardboard suitcase" used by early emigrants. This case comes as the container of dreams, ideas, memories, perspectives and why not nostalgia of new Italian emigrants.

 

The suitcase with the inspiration of each artist acquires an accentuated symbolism wherein tactile and sensory suggestions are heightened The language becomes that of surfaces, volumes, emptiness, fullness, positive and negative spaces that transform a suitcase in a sculpture. The suitcase became symbols, and the new sculpture gains eloquence and calls silently for a different reading.