An internationally renowned street artist, Ale Senso presents Castelnuovo di Porto – in the metropolitan city of Rome – with a multifaceted and complex work: a monumental site-specific installation, a narrative in images that depicts humanity and explores a theme defined by the very title of the work: Antropìa, an italian neologism that captures the very essence of being human – the quality of humanity understood not as a biological species but as the sum of its contradictions. That is, the capacity to create immense beauty and, at the same time, destruction. In a way, ‘antropìa’ could be translated as ‘anthropia’.
Ale Senso does not paint man, but rather this very quality. And she does so across 630 square metres of industrial infrastructure, from the floor to the very top, inside a former tuff quarry.
The fire-fighting tank – a ten-metre-high steel cylinder – forms the main body of the work: a visual anthology of humanity. Ten stories from the oral traditions of every continent unfold along its circumference: the shell-like universe of the Society Islands, the Argentine Ombú, the creation of the deserts, the two Cherokee wolves, the lord who loved dragons, Şahmeran, Aesop’s donkey, the broken vase, Mukuku, the kangaroo’s dance. Stories from worlds apart that explore, through different images, the same questions. Bringing them to a close is an eleventh voice, the only modern one: Trilussa’s ‘La Statistica’, in Roman dialect. It is a deliberate gesture: folk wisdom is not a relic; it continues to be produced and continues to assert, with the bitter irony of Trilussa’s chicken, that often those who have little are not inclined to share what they do have.
But the true critical focus of the work is a wound. A painted crack runs vertically the entire height of the cistern and interrupts the geometric frieze that runs around its circumference – the sole element that held all the stories together: it is the very embodiment of anthropia. The frieze illustrates what humanity is capable of: binding, building, uniting. The crack reveals what humanity, at the same time, does: undermine what it has built.
The third part of the work is the adjacent technical building, which Ale Senso transforms into the Altar of the Ancestors. A multitude of figures are engaged in a group dance that envelops the four façades: many are reinterpretations of real artefacts, such as the rock carvings of Valcamonica, the Egyptian baboon of Thoth, and the Tiki statues of the Marquesas Islands in Polynesia. Its theme is the primordial bond between humankind and nature, tracing back to the threshold where the distinction itself dissolves. It is no coincidence that the dance concludes, on the façade facing the reservoir, with animal figures and a crown within an oculus through which a glimpse of the universe can be seen. That is where everything originates. From that circle, in fact, the plants emerge, spreading around the building and then, travelling along the system’s pipes, reaching the reservoir. It is the most significant detail of the entire work. Those water pipes trace the path of a dual migration: the flows that led the human species to spread from Africa to the remotest corners of the planet, and, at the same time, the connections that today link those corners through modern infrastructure.
The project, promoted and funded by Prologis as part of the PARKlife™ programme’s philosophy, demonstrates how the enhancement of these sites through urban art can regenerate and revitalise historic heritage, breathing new life into contemporary sites.
Through PARKlife™, Prologis aims to create monumental works of street art designed to further enrich logistics spaces, where this art form plays a vital role in enhancing areas frequented daily by numerous industry professionals. This approach reflects Prologis’s broader commitment to creating functional, welcoming logistics spaces that are integrated into the local context, giving rise to a project that occupies a prominent place in Italy’s urban art and logistics landscape.
‘Antropìa’ by Ale Senso can be viewed at Prologis Park in Castelnuovo di Porto (SDA3 – the third SDA sorting centre), with free admission during the centre’s opening hours:
Monday to Friday, 7.00 am to 9.00 pm, and Saturday from 7.00 am to 1.00 pm.