A more pertinent setting could not be imagined for the work of Annalisa Pirovano, who examines the theme of the relation  between sexuality andpower. Her work takes up a subject that has always been greatly loved byartists: “Susanna and the Elders”. It is the story of a young and beautiful girlwho is surprised by two older men who are visiting her husband’s house. Thetwo “elders”, recently appointed judges, first importune her with obsceneproposals, then, faced with her resistance, accuse her before her husband ofadultery. Pirovano imagines the scene inside a vintage bathroom, bringing upto date the Bible story and bringing it in line with collective erotic imagery.Her work is therefore a reflection on sex, power and corruption.

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Regina José Galindo’s video, La verdad, certainly provides one of the most intense and dramatic moments of the itinerary. It is a famous work, exhibited in 2013, and it censures the degeneration of power under the Guatemalan President Efrain Rios Montt. The artist is sitting at a school desk, reading declarations by women victims of rape and trickery during the Guatemalan civil war. Her action is interrupted by a dentist who periodically injects an anaesthetic in her mouth, reducing her capacity to formulate the words. Her reading is therefore transformed into a mantra, pronounced with enormous difficulty. In spite of the systematic attempt to censor her voice, represented by the figure of the dentist, the artist continues to speak regardless, though her voice is broken, her lips swollen, and the words come more and more slowly. Thus, the artist’s body become the unit with which to measure the despotic pressure of power. It takes upon itself the atrocities suffered by the collective body.

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Another global excursion is to be seen in this room on the first floor. Two artists, one Italian, the other American, take up the theme of South Africa yesterday and today. Yazmany Arboleda, originally from Columbia, now lives in New York, where he has developed “living sculptures” projects with the potential to change the world. In South Africa, he has set his sights on the question of buildings left empty by political and economic power. The action narrated by the drawings exhibited at Casa Testori concerns the Central Business District of Johannesburg, where nine buildings were marked one night by splashes of pink paint on their façades. Pietro Ruffo, on the other hand, has taken a look at the country’s past. The artist’s work is based on an analysis of two different pre-revolutionary moments in the history of South Africa, and is the result of a residency project at Johannesburg. The first period is 1650, before the arrival of the Dutch. The second period refers to the end of the 1980s, characterized by the revolts that preceded the end of apartheid. In the first case, Ruffo the artist reworks Dutch prints. In the second, he uses protest banners which acted as authentic arms against the regime. “Before a revolution, before the time when something changes, people have one single idea of freedom and that idea of freedom is very strong in their minds”, declares the artist. The leitmotif of this room, therefore, is the analysis orgeneration of mechanisms that lead to change.

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The ascent to the first floor of the house is marked by an emblematic cycle, created by the Chinese artist and film maker Zhang Bingjian. The title, Hall of Fame, is ironic. In reality, it is a “wall of shame”. Bingjian commissioned a group of artists to provide 1,600 portraits of Chinese public officials accused of corruption. Launched In 2010, it is an ongoing project, continually updated. Bingjian has brought to Casa Testori a small selection from this enormous gallery of corruption. Emblematically, the artist had all the portraits painted in pink on pink, the colour of the Chinese 100-yuan banknote.

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The last room of the ground floor itinerary offers a comparison between two works of extremely strong impact. As visitors enter, they find in front of them two large ceramic works by Bertozzi & Casoni. Giampaolo Bertozzi and Stefano Del Monte Casoni have been working as a team since 1980. They create disconcerting sculptures in which ceramics are used to create representations that negate the delicate, graceful nature of the material. Composizione scomposizione [Comosition Decomposition] is a combination of tubes, connecters, wheels and taps suggesting the idea of a clearly nonfunctioning functionality. It is also a depiction of rules that have accumulated to the point of consolidating themselves as intricate conglomerations, without rhyme or reason. Corruption, in Bertozzi & Casoni’s works, has often taken the form of food that is “corrupted” by oxidation processes. In this series – the complete cycle of Composizione scomposizione consists of seven panels – the metaphor is more expressly aimed at the chaos unleashed in a social organization when the rules are changed.

The link with Filippo Berta’s video is cogent and immediate. Homo homini lupus, a work created in 2011, was presented for the first time at the Madre of Naples. Berta takes literally Plautus’s famous expression, which became the concept underlying Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy. In a moonlit scenario suggesting the end of history, a pack of wolves wrangles around an Italian flag. The piece of cloth is violently bitten and torn till it is reduced to shreds. The video may be interpreted as a brutal metaphor of a social gathering where the logic of arrogance gains the upper hand, thereby treading underfoot even an item, the national flag, that should be a collective symbol. Corruption is a negative force that destroys relations, an open doorway to violence, even when it is underhand, non-explicit and, in its way, “sincere”, like that of thewolves fighting over the flag.

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This is a small corner room, the walls of which were all painted in 2013 by a team overseen by Massimo Kaufmann. At the centre of the room, the exhibition itinerary envisages Testa femminile [Female Head], a new work, displayed for the first time, by Luca Pignatelli. Pignatelli has always been attentive to the theme of memory and the past, conceiving his own art almost as an act of resistance against the implacable corrosive action of time. In this case, the salvage work involved the support of the painting, which is also a sculpture. It was created, in fact, on an iron sheet discarded from the roof of a church in Engadina and intended for the dump.

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Three artists meet in this fascinating room in Casa Testori, creating a dialogue that has recourse to bold, involving expressive forms. Marco Cingolani has brought into play a banner-poster, an authentic piece of publicity art. The slogan, in great letters, poses a demand that might seem obvious if it were not negated at every moment by reality Il dovere al potere [Let Power Stand by Duty]. The sheer nakedness of the work leaves us speechless: it is like a cry echoing in silence. While the banner is a work that Cingolani has carried with him for many years, almost as an imploration, the painting in this room was specially created for the exhibition at Casa Testori. It is a portrait of Bernard de Mandeville, an Anglo-Dutch physician, philosopher and satirist to whom we owe a definition of hypocrisy which has entered the common language: “Private vices, public benefits”. His best-known book, in fact, published in 1714, is entitled “The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits”. In its first version, it was called “The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest”, leaving no doubt as to the real identity of the “public benefits”.

Massimo Kaufmann has brought to Casa Testori a “shouted-to-the-fourwinds” version of a work he created at the beginning of the 1990s. As with Cingolani, the chosen means of expression was deliberately shouted to the four winds: a wallpaper which exaggeratedly enlarges the original and emphasizes its disquieting message. The cycle took as its inspiration Goya’s celebrated caprices, a merciless depiction of corrupt society, dominated by lies and abuse of power. Kaufmann reinforces this message with a bold, contemporary language. The originals were created, in fact, with typewriter characters, accentuating the caricatural aspects of this portrayal of a society seemingly corroded by all-pervasive corruption. In order to stress the public scope of the message contained in this work, Kaufmann also created a signed and numbered version of the wallpaper, on sale to visitors.

Stefano Arienti has contributed a fascinating Installation to this room, entitled Lame Italia [Italian Ploughshares], in which tools belonging to memories of the artist’s rural origins – he was born in Asola, in the Province of Mantua – assume an enigmatic appearance, as if they have lost the positive sense of their function. A delicate metaphor illustrating the overturning of values that ensues as a result of social pathologies such as corruption.

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Two photographers meet in this domestic environment, they exploiting the same device: pairs of photographs that evidently create a dialogue between themselves, but the relationship between which is not so clear. A celebrated image by Letizia Battaglia of a mafia crime in Palermo, I due Cristi [The Two Christs] of 1982, clashes with another image, Il Ballo, Festa di Capodanno a Villa Airoldi [The Ball, New Year’s Celebration at Villa Airoldi] taken in 1985 in Palermo, documenting the blissful indifference of society. Blood and crystal glasses, dark and sparkling light, threatening silence and bursts of merriment. And if these were all images from a single film? Giovanni Hänninen relates the same story in Milan. The sandwich booth emerging from the fog is that of Via Celoria and is the property of Loreno Tetti. He has been called the “anti-’ndrangheta sandwich seller”. Loreno Tetti, in fact, was the only witness who did not withdraw in the trial against the street sellers’ protection racket run by the Flachi clan. Shortly after he gave his testimony, on 19 July 2012, his truck was set on fire. From small to large-scale economy: in front of the Milan Stock Exchange, there is a sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan. Provocative, but thought-challenging: is it really out of place? It was put there at the height of the crisis that brought Italy to its knees. A crisis that exploded as a result of the corrupt workings of the financial world. “The contemporary crime boss”, writes Hänninen with Alberto Amoretti, who carried out the research on the basis of photographic reports, “is far removed from the cliché of the rough mafioso, he is a white-collar worker who has studied and is well-versed in economics, finance and technology”.

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Migrants have experienced at first hand the blackmail of corruption. They experienced it on the other side of the Mediterranean when they had to put their hard won savings in the hands of the boat operators or their agents. They have often met it in Italy, when their reception finished in the hands of organizations run by racketeers. Two works in this exhibition, of great impact and value, bear witness to the migrants. Tindar, the “nickname” of a Milanese artist now living in Rome – and who has opened the doors of his home to a migrant – is present with a triptych inspired by an experience at the frontier, near Calais, in the months of the “Jungle”, the great refugee camp of migrants hoping to cross the Channel. With Migrazioni [Migrations], Tindar overturned a paradigm. He asked the migrants (for a small payment) to gather the footprints of those who, for whatever reason, passed through the camp. The footprints, mounted on panels covered with earth, create a nebulous image of presences crossing from one world to another. In a work such as this, Tindar brings into play his being as an artist. The same thing happens with a charismatic name from another generation. Corrado Levi has brought to Casa Testori a photo of himself (taken by Beppe Finessi), in which he is wearing clothes found on the rocks of Otranto (Vestiti di arrivati [Clothes of people arriving], 2015). Clothes abandoned by migrants who had landed there. Levi gathered them up and put them on. “I imagined I was other people’s bodies”, he has said. “I know I was pretending, but when I could, I felt the thing inside myself. When I take them off and leave them there on a beach, there on the rocks for others to find, that is the moment when I hope to change my life. This is freedom. It’s like baptism… For believers”.

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A single artist monopolizes this room: Antonio Marras. Known as a stylist, he has always combined his professional activity with a prolific artistic production which was recently celebrated in a major exhibition at the Milan Triennial. Marras’s work is an installation, the content of which interweaves closely with the other works in the room. Le malelingue [Malicious Tongues] is an installation consisting of a cascade of darting tongues flowing from a great pile of books. The work is inspired by one of Marras’s best loved artists, Carol Rama. The reiterating tongues extending over the space appear as an ironic condemnation of the “private vice” of gossip, which embraces far from beneficial forms of public conduct.

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