Simona Ghizzoni

Simona Ghizzoni. Milk Wood

Commission 2025

We are not wholly bad or good / Who live our lives under Milk Wood, / And Thou, I know, wilt be the first / To see our best side, not our worst (1)

“I too had forgotten the old station, even though it was from there that I left for the first time, as a young adult, many years ago. While I was trying to figure out how to describe a place I had forgotten, an old edition of Under Milk Wood, translated by Carlo Izzo, caught my eye on the bookshelf”.

Under Milk Wood is Dylan Thomas’s last work, published posthumously, a radio play that recounts the dreams, hopes and nightmares of a small, colourful community at nightfall. Thomas invites us not to be afraid and to enter the inhabitants’ rooms as if the walls had become transparent during sleep. It is an invitation to consider listening, or in our case looking, as an ontological act, as an affirmation and recognition of the existence of others and, consequently, of our own. 

The gaze has two directions; as we move away, what we are looking at also moves away, when we walk quickly, careful not to meet the eyes of others. 

Simona Ghizzoni began early in the morning, listening to and collecting the words of a group of women who meet on Wednesdays in Via Turri, at Binario 49. Other women joined the initial group, women who live in the neighbourhood, others who work there, others who are volunteers or who come here to meet up.

The work, which moves between photography, pictorial processing and audio, is therefore a proposal for a lexical and visual reinterpretation of the station neighbourhood, starting precisely from these weekly dialogues. The images on display will be largely the result of collaboration with the participants, who are in fact co-authors of the works.