About the project
The infopoetry was developed during the 2018/2019 edition of DensityDesign Final Synthesis Studio at Politecnico di Milano, with the aim of experiment different ways to deal with data, by focusing on poetry – in the sense of poiesis – as a design approach more than just a subject for visual representation. The project was an individual experimentation: we were given freedom to explore with any format, medium and materials, as well as stories, narrative and metaphors.
Design Process
The artwork wants to stress the process of assuming heroin through vein injection (bucare/bucarsi) by applying the same process to little human waxworks (bruciare/bruciarsi), thus making clear that assuming that kind of drug brings to unrepeatable damages and to death.
The data were collected from geoverdose.it, an interactive web database that recollects informations about all the deaths in Italy caused by drugs and other kind of addictions, starting from January 1st, 2017. The informations are sorted by: date, sex, age, nationality, drugs assumed, in addition to where and in what circumstances the body was found. Of the 254 deaths in 2018, 159 (63%) were caused by heroin overdose. The most relevant features of the dataset were the very details that could be scraped from the articles of the newspapers that were linked to every victim, like what kind of objects were close to the corpses: it was interesting to notice that in a lot of cases there were syringes, spoons, and tourniquets. The 159 waxworks were manually displayed one by one and then melted from the bottom, just like the heroin before being injected by the victims.
