Cristiano Berti (Italy) –
(Turin, 1967) began to work as a painter and sculptor in 1987, shortly after obtaining his diploma at the Primo Liceo Artistico and enrolling with the Faculty of Architecture at Turin University, where he graduated several years later. His son Samuel was born in 1992. His first exhibition, in 1993, was a personal exhibition at the Premio Salvi in Sassoferrato (Italy). Alongside his artistic activity, he studied history of technology, publishing various specialist papers. From the mid-1990s he worked on a mobile unit for health risk reduction among migrant sex workers, an experience which, years later, was to form the basis of various visual art works. At the end of the 1990s he stopped working as an outreach worker, though continuing to work professionally in the field of social inclusion and gender empowerment.
Title: Lety, 2009, 19:40
Lety is documenting an event which took place in May 2009, involving two Slovak Roma singers, František Ďuďa and Martina Ďuďová. Ferko and Martinka are brother and sister; they are blind and forced by illness to move about in a wheel chair. The event involved visiting a commemoration for the victims of the concentration camp at Lety, a village that is now in the Czech Republic, which during the Nazi occupation was the prison for 1,309 Roma, most of whom were later transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Since the 1970’s the site of the Lety camp has been used as an industrial pig farm. For this reason, the commemoration is held in a nearby woodland