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Booktitle: FNDAMENTALE 1992-2002
Author: Ivan Northyn
Hardcover, Matte Lamination + Foil Print over the title
Pages: 652
Language: Italian + QR Code for English version on line
Dimensions: 24 x 30,6 x 6 cm./ 9.4 x 12 x 2.4 inch.
3.000 Restored pics (480 Panoramic collages) / Thousands of unpublished
Local and other italian main cities writers + from different European countries,
USA and Australia.
40+ INTERVIEWS / TEXTS:
Bread, Tawa, DropC, Dosey, MastroK, VTO Crew, Ces53, Deshamer, Hekto, Airone, Furto, Robin, Mind, Riso, Spice, GTS Crew, Seyok, Flik, Jake, Rae, Mr. Euro, Shampo, Vino, Venet, Deco, Senz, Spiv and many more…
+ Technical texts on the lines history, train models & anti-graffiti methods.
The complete history of trainwriting on the Northern Railways of Milan:
genesis and development narrated by all the protagonists.
FNdamentale 1992-2002: a one-of-a-kind chronographic volume which, like a time
capsule, contains the complete history of the first eleven years of graffiti on the
FN Line (Ferrovie Nord Milano) and the complete history of the line itself.
FN Line is one of the cornerstones of Italian trainwriting, a legendary line whose
fame has gone beyond its regional borders to the entire country of Italy, Europe and
beyond the oceans.
Designed and conceived as a magnum opus full of details, it retraces all the events:
from the early experimental pieces in the Milan Cadorna and Saronno stations in
1992, through all the hardcore of the nineties up to the new graffiti game of the
early 2000s.
This publication was built on the solid foundations of first-hand experiences in those years. Underpinned by a thirty-year passion for historicization, the work was generated through four years of research and development, merging into 652 pages.
More than 40 interviews and stories from the protagonists of the movement. A railway technical subtext that places data, and dates, at the basis of the rigorous monthly chronological order of the 3,000 restored analog photos, of which more than half still unpublished, and as many as 480 revived in panoramic collages of pieces, end 2 ends, wholecars and wholetrains, representing hundreds of Italian and foreign writers.
FNdamentale is an “essential” on the shelf of anyone who considers himself an admirer of global trainwriting; an unlimited source of information and inspiration.
A timeless collector’s item and an encyclopedia for future generations
FNDAMENTALE 1992-2002 a review by Pietro Rivasi
As a great fan of trainwriting and books on the subject, the first thing that struck me about this project was the incipit:
“To understand every facet of the first eleven years of trainwriting on the FN Line, it is necessary to rely on the history of the railway transport company that sacrificed its rolling stock”.
A single sentence immediately clarifies that what you are leafing through is not the classic but precious book on the history of a counterculture “for us by us”, but a much more in-depth and reasoned work, also designed for a much wider public: I therefore had the awareness of finally finding myself in front of the fruit of the work of someone who had taken the responsibility of reconstructing, in its many facets, the history of a specific and very important Italian railway line.
Finally – because the movement born in the United States now 60 years ago, for over 30 has also represented in our country the humus from which emerge some of the most influential public figures in the most disparate fields, from communication, graphics, photography, passing through contemporary art in its strictest sense.
Reconstructing the history of writing in a scientific way is therefore essential to know its path, and the scene that has matured around the FN line is unquestionably important at an international level.
Finally – because the movement is far from dying out; on the contrary, it is in continuous renewal, both from the point of view of formal solutions and from that of the protagonists, and it is therefore advisable to have books, or tools that cannot disappear overnight like a website or a social platform, to being able to study the history of a culture that generates a continuous flow of ephemeral works, the documentation of which risks remaining buried in the basements, hard drives and memories that are not always reliable in the long run.
Finally – because in other countries such as Denmark, France, Finland, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, researches, albeit less in-depth, which have as their object writing on specific railway lines have already been published, demonstrating their fundamental importance, precisely, for understand and study a phenomenon that has forever changed visual communication on a global level.
Very important – in many aspects, but from the point of view of the history of writing, the FN line were probably the first Italian private line to be painted and the one on which a real “war of style” led to the creation of pieces that today they can be called classics. It represented a place of ferment and contamination between the 90s and part of the 2000s, which we could compare to an analog “social network”, prior to the advent of the internet, as was the New York subway between the 70s and 80s, contributing significantly to the growth of the phenomenon when it was still not particularly widespread in Italy.
FNdamentale is an encyclopaedic volume with multiple reading levels, in which the writer passionate about lettering and styles will find thousands of selected photos (3,000 of the more than 15,000 collected by the author), restored and distributed chronologically with monthly precision (1992-2002), which they offer the possibility of following the evolution of individual players step by step.
It should be noted that, in addition to the classics that have shaped the following generations in some way, there is no shortage of unpublished works; even the “percentage” presence of the pieces of the individual writers and crews was dosed to give as faithful a picture as possible of what went on along those lines and, for those who have experienced the phenomenon only through the sector media, there may be surprises.
Railroaders and railway enthusiasts in general will then find the meticulous reconstruction of all the stages of the Milano Northern Railways (FN Line), from their conception up to 2002, with all the intermediate steps: the origin of each single type of train used, the periods of closing specific routes and opening others, expanding depots or building infrastructure, advent of buff, change of liveries etc. All this, thanks to the irreplaceable collaboration of Alberto Lagotto.
This historical-archival work which might not seem strictly related to writing and which you will not find in the same detail in any other publication in the sector is instead, as the incipit of the book states, invaluable for anyone wishing to access the next level of reading, something of obvious but almost always overlooked: the correlation between the structured corporate activities of the railway network managers and the activities of the writers.
The reader will thus discover, for example, the reasons why Milano Northern Railways took years to activate an efficient buffing of the carriages or why in some precise periods thre were FS line trains on the FN line network, perhaps discovering that certain rumors were only urban legends.
However, Ivan Northyn’s research does not end here: the cataloging of the pieces in his archive reaches such detail that, for each of the 3,000 published photographs, the code number (and the train side) of the portrayed wagon is indicated, allowing the exact reconstruction of the stratifications occurred over the course of days, weeks, months, years.
The work – costing the author 4 years of very tiring (and not always profitable) public relations, scans, Photoshop restorations and endless hours of study – also thanks to the 15 years spent on the front line living and documenting the phenomenon is made even more precious from the direct testimonies of many of the protagonists, so that the reconstruction of the events is entrusted to multiple sources.
FNdamentale is a work in which the obsessive passion for the infrastructure of the FN Line stands out at least as much as that for writing and which raises the bar of what is possible to do in this area, in the awareness of the historical-artistic, social and cultural importance of a movement as vast, controversial and heterogeneous as train bombing.
Petro Rivasi [Urbaner.it]