Giuditta Branconi’s generation-dividing show at Collezioni Maramotti is the evidence we need that when it comes to image, perception is all about volume control.
“I’m not a pleasant person,” says Giuditta Branconi, speaking through an interpreter at the opening of her new show “Cannon Fodder” at Collezioni Maramotti. “It is a problem that my work is pleasant somehow”. So not, on the surface, at all like Lethal Bizzle’s 2004 famously banned breakthrough grime hit POW!. And yet the act of generational change is a constant, with the same tragedy of incomprehension a fundamental component. Whilst Branconi’s image and reference soaked canvases have been freshly commissioned for this Spring’s show, POW! is now celebrating its 22nd anniversary. Branconi was just 6 years old when Lethal B changed musical history, but it isn’t a stretch to say that Branconi’s new work evokes strong comparisons in the cultural moment it captures.
First POW!; in 2004, as major labels rejected grime the track, which captured London’s pirate radio sound, became a huge, organic hit. Its intense energy caused unprecedented reactions on dancefloors. However, alarmed venues and local authorities, unfamiliar with grime’s style, took the braggadocio lyrics literally, leading to venue bans as authorities feared riots. Conversely, young Black British audiences in 2004 connected viscerally with the track’s authentic reflection of their frustrations through its relatable, familiar communication style and references, seeing not simply riot, but also rave. Yet Branconi’s work isn’t being banned, far from it. Critics of un certain âge are obsessed with its technique, its colour soaked layering of references, its appropriative technique, its pretty Disney bird silhouettes, and Branconi’s lovely figurative style. But for the artist, they’re at risk of missing the point.
Branconi is angry. A commission that she had intended to be a consideration of the mother changed direction as the geopolitical landscape created panic and uncertainty, and her work is filled from edge to edge with an impressionistic communication of her thoughts and reactions to the world around her, expressed using the non-hierarchical synthesis that social-network-native generations deploy with ease and fluency. As Branconi says “We are bombarded by sad pictures, so it would have been reductive to paint a mother with a dead child’ References are drawn from every medium; Cartoons, poems, political tracts, tobacconist’s shopfronts and film stills, with the work intentionally rejecting the idea of a focal point for the work in favour of an immersive global sensation – one installed piece even allows the viewer to be fully surrounded by works. For some viewers, the rage is clear – these are elegiac works filled with the furious energy of dismay, hope, frustration, anger, fear and yearning. For others, they may read simply as an aesthetic.
After POW! won single of the year at the 2005 MOBOs, major labels rushed to sign up grime acts and grime became the UK’s beloved signature sound. The legacy of the track, which featured 10 MCs and multiple samples, continues to this day; it was used outside the UK’s Parliament as an anthem by 2010’s national student protests and has become something of a standard, updated semi-regularly by the grime stars of the day. For those authorities who listened to POW! and heard only threat, not melancholy, the clock was running down, and it may be that we are entering that same phase now with art, where some will see only the pretty riot, while others see the melancholic anger of the rave.
Giuditta Branconi, Cannon Fodder, 8th March – 26th July 2026, Collezione Maramotti
Free admission to the exhibition with the following hours: Thursday and Friday, 2:30 pm to 6:30 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 10:30 am to 6:30 pm. Closed: 25th April, 1st May
