Join us for a special book presentation by Piergiorgio Casotti, co-author of The Gini Index (index G). Casotti will present a live reading of his book along with video and musical components and followed by a signing.

index G is co-authored by Piergiorgio Casotti and Emanuele Brutti, designed by Fiorenza Pinna and published by Skinnerboox.

The Gini Index (index G) is a statistical measure of inequality, also used to measure residential segregation. The optimism associated with recent declines in racial segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas may be dampened by new evidence of racial and ethnic geographic balkanization at other levels of geography. A new macro-segregation, where the locus of racial differentiation resides increasingly at higher scales of geography (e.g. between central cities, suburban areas and fringe areas) rather than in neighborhood-to-neighborhood differences. In other words ethno-racial segregation has declined at some levels of geography (neighborhood- to-neighborhood) while increasing at other spatial scales (city-to-suburb or suburb-to-suburb). In St Louis, for instance, ZIP codes matter. North of Delmar blvd, 95% black, life expectancy is 67. At a walking distance, few hundreds yards south of Delmar blvd, 70% white, a person’s life expectancy is 82.

Silence, uncertainty, absence are the words that drive the book. It is on the subtle perception of (human) failure that this work is based around. The idea of a discontinuity between adjacent human spatial systems. With the unusual and intriguing use of text and real images we are trying to unbalance the viewer, strengthen the sense of anomaly, pushing him to perceive a sense of oddity.

As in a visual dialogue between R. Carver and E. Hopper this work unfolds as a “theater of silence” play, made of an absence of characters and their peculiar stories, where things seen and narrated remain untold and suspended in time, in that specific moment of uncertainty, poised between something elusive that just happened, and whose consequences we are just able to perceive, or the exciting feeling that it will happen soon. A limbo filled with tensions and doubts. Nothing happens apparently, but the story takes place in the silence of lives.

PIERGIORGIO CASOTTI Born in 1972 and graduated with a degree in Economics, he is a photographer and director. He has always been attracted by the dynamics of human beings that he tries to approach on a multi media level, mixing videos, words, images and sounds. What he photographs always has something to do with him; it’s about knowing his intimacy and facing his fears by experiencing other worlds and lives. He has published three book and shot three documentaries and one short film.

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