as a single exhibited work:

2006
Universal Embassy, curated by Gabriele Tinti, AOC F58, FotoGrafia – Festival Internazionale di Roma, V edition, Rome, Italy

solo exhibitions:

2012
Vertigo of Reality, curated by Gabriele Tinti, text by Luigi Fassi, Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona, Italy (catalogue Allemandi & C. ISBN 978-88-422-2104-3)

group exhibitions:

2009
Da Guarene all’Etna 1999-2009. Dieci anni di fotografia italiana, curated by Filippo Maggia, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Guarene, Italy

2009
Filippo Maggia, Da Guarene all’Etna 1999-2009. Dieci anni di fotografia italiana, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene

Gabriele Tinti - Universal Embassy

Cristiano Berti addresses the recent history of the XX century from a Nietzschian position; that is, with the idea that it is legitimate to serve history “only insofar as it serves living”.
Berti knows well that history has become irreparably weak. It is no longer the magistra vitae consigned to us by tradition  - reality has demonstrated the fallacy of a historical ethic - and it is much less the educational instrument, inherited from the XIX century, at the service of power. To history, and to its gaze, nothing remains beyond a withdrawal within its specific functions as custodian of memory, of different and changing collective identities.
Cristiano Berti has dedicated himself to this idea for some time now, preferring the memory of communities in the shadows, of that part of society destined to pass its existence in silence, in underground terrain. Thus the artist brings with him, through the creative act, the classical Greek meaning of the term history (ìstoria), which signifies investigation, inquiry, curiosity. It is precisely upon these presuppositions that he constructs his work.
The photographic investigation proposed in this exhibition is concerned with the desolate images of the Somalian Embassies abandoned to themselves. Places of the exercise of diplomacy - a typical example of the stability and organicity that this has assumed in the modern epoch - of a young country which dissolved in 1991 after little more than thirty years of existence, following a tragic civil war.
Since then Somalia has become a territory deprived of a State and its legations have come to represent a Country which no longer exists, suddenly excluded from the quadrants of international politics and media interest. Only the constructions which once hosted its embassies remain, scattered around the world, to testify to its existence. In some cases they appear to be empty containers deprived of their former soul, in other cases they have become small islands of legality and national identity, reaching the paradox of the Ambassade Universelle of Brussels which welcomes the sans papier. Thus, the principle of extraterritoriality which once animated these defunct embassies, once diplomatic representations, is redefined in a spontaneous and symbolical manner.
Cristiano Berti photographs these buildings almost as if he wants to assess the disputed territorial patrimony of one of the poorest countries in the world, to illustrate the conventionality and arbitrariness of concepts of State, territory and right of stay as they were characterised in the western world during the entire XX century. He emphasises an unpredictable - both locatable and momentary - return to the temporariness and precariousness of contemporary government institutions. He therefore becomes the voice of a collective memory, by now anaesthetised, which he makes his own privileged creative catalyst in order to demonstrate that memory is above all forgetfulness, continual omission, intimate and necessary pretence. Berti restores the spectacle of the contemporary in terms of metaphysical windows opened on the events most in the shadows, feedback which constitutes the oblivious reality in relation to those particular events. The reality described by the author is therefore one which tends to disguise itself in new and controlled images, of ever changing masks almost as though it were a theatrical stage, depressed by frustrated visions and too often silenced.
Consequently, the historical investigation becomes weak indeed. It survives as memory but meanwhile expresses its own incapacity to propose itself yet again, with authenticity, as the critical conscience of society.
Through the transverse and uncomfortable progression of his own artistic creation, Berti dreams of overcoming the deadlock of an entire attitude of contemporary thought.