Denzolu. In dialect. The sheet.
A word that became a symbol. And then an artwork.

Denzolu is the title of the complex project that artist Franz Cerami dedicated to Corigliano-Rossano. A municipality born in 2018 from the merger of two Calabrian cities. A new community. With ancient stories. With faces. With language. With a border that, for years, was imagined as real.

This work speaks about crossing. About the perimeter. About the limit. And about the possibility of overcoming it.

Corigliano and Rossano. Two communities that have long been rivals. Two communities divided by a “sheet” that, in popular imagination, the Rossanesi placed to block the sun from the Coriglianesi. A poetic myth. Sharp. Childlike. And cruel, like every legend that hides a fracture. Then, in recent history, something changed. The need to unite matured. The threshold was crossed. The limit was overcome. In an age of walls and fences, of lacerating divisions, this community chose to unite.

In Corigliano-Rossano, Cerami created one hundred photographic portraits of citizens of the new community. Portraits made in different places across the city. Then transformed. Painted again through digital painting, mixed with oil paint and graphite. The portraits become sheets. Printed. Hung from windows. Exposed to the air. To the street. To the gaze of others.

Finally, the sheets are assembled into a single large installation. And projected onto an imaginary single sheet on the façade of the Torre del Cupo.

What once divided. Now unites.
The sheet becomes a shared skin. A common surface. A collective portrait.