Careof hosts “Soffice come l’erba ruvido come l’asfalto”, a project by Tomaso Clavarino developed in 2023 in close collaboration with residents and social workers of the Baggio neighborhood. The research is presented through a book and an exhibition, curated by Matteo Balduzzi and promoted by Consorzio Sir, as part of the project Teen City Baggio, funded by Comune di Milano.

As Matteo Balduzzi writes in the catalogue text, “Soffice come l’erba ruvido come l’asfalto” stems from the experience lived by Tomaso Clavarino for over three months in via Quarti, Milan, and its immediate surroundings. The artist gathers and conveys a varied mosaic of fragments—dry, formally restrained images, revealing details and nuances born of careful and prolonged presence.

Objects, details, and colors thus reveal themselves as necessarily precise, perfectly recognizable to anyone who crosses, lives, or works in this or other suburban neighborhoods, even if each individual situation may seem accidental and fleeting. The portraits - elusive, as is natural in such a complex and layered social geography - suggest a wary but sincere and real complicity. It’s clear: they measure the physical space and give it meaning. Not by chance, the people with whom Clavarino formed a silent pact are youth and adolescents, a life stage inherently symbolic of transition, sweetness and harshness together, often a painful search for self-representation.

Human presence relates to the concrete and asphalt typical of the city but also to the greenery and nature that emerges from the Parco delle Cave, a wild and almost fearsome presence, seemingly able to break through and creep among the ALER buildings. In their undefined appearance - that is, as spaces that resist univocal definition and fixed function - the areas depicted in the photographs remind us how indeterminacy can also signify possibility. This is particularly relevant in a city like Milan, obsessed with occupying every void, with the sparkle of every surface, with measurement, profit, and performance.

These places claim their presence in the face of history, simply reminding us that they exist. And that, among unruly and spontaneous grasses, crumbling concrete, stretches of gravel marked by tire tracks, and torn fences that open into new worlds, people grow up, play, fall in love, perhaps even more than in other places.

Somewhere between explorer and wanderer, Tomaso Clavarino moves through a space that is both familiar and mysterious, slowly, with uncommon sensitivity, in search of clues to build a map, one that helps us as viewers to find our bearings and allows those who live there to recognize themselves, even if only partially. And, in doing so, he brings us together. “The story begins at ground level, with footsteps,” wrote De Certeau.