Mannequins, live or dead. Mannequins, or dummies of human beings, have ever fascinated painters and photographers. They add mystery to the concept of identity, or play a false identity in a quite literary way. In these sequences, in my pictures on the one hand I describe the mannequins as live fashion tools (but not yet at work: as you can see in the “Shop windows” section, under the “Vanity appearance” heading) and on the other hand I portray “Dead mannequins” dismissed by an old dummies factory near Bergamo and stacked in a storage room in Mantova, in summer 2011. The painter Lucio Pozzi had stored them there before using them in an installation as part of his exhibition “Cumuli” the following Fall at Palazzo Te. In this extraordinary situation I met stacks of bodies, arms, legs, hands, disturbingly evocative of the ones seen by the liberation armies in Germany, in 1945, inside the Nazi concentration camps. There I saw also few uncorrupted heads, pretty faces seemingly looking at each other, like survivors trustful in justice and peace.