“On the front of the 10,000 lire banknote in circulation from 1984 until 1999, the year of the advent of the euro, there was a portrait with a nineteenth-century flavor which, for Italians in their thirties at least, is still a cornerstone of the collective imagination. The character depicted in three-quarter view was Alessandro Volta in the version sketched from life by Giovita Garavaglia. Next to the scientist, the banknote depicted the first model of his most famous invention, the battery. On the reverse was the Temple erected in Como, Volta's hometown, in 1927, on the occasion of the centenary of his death.

For almost two decades, that bank note was one of the most important advertising vehicles of the Como capital. Furthermore, many Italians have become familiar with a luminary with a dapper profile and a severe look thanks to a banknote which, over time, with the complicity of inflation rather than the increase in per capita income, has been widely distributed.

The work by Fabrizio Musa and Enzo Santambrogio is grafted onto this amarcord of the pre-euro era. The banknotes had already been used by Musa as an iconographic source in the digital processing of the nineties. In the works created together with Santambrogio, however, the 10,000 lire note is loaded with that ironically retro sense that characterizes the most recent work of this "photographer and experimenter", as he himself likes to define himself.

The title of the work, 120 VOLT(A), refers both to the 120 reworkings of Volta's effigy created by the Musa-Santambrogio duo, and to the standard of electricity supply in vogue in non-European countries. A linguistic trick which, never more than in this case, creates a semantic short circuit.”

(cit. Roberto Borghi)