From his first steps in the art circuit, Enzo Umbaca’s research was characterized by the ability to intervene actively in the social environment. Without waiting for an official authorization, he started to consider the public space of Milan as his testing field. Sometimes with performances – where he acted in first person playing particular roles; sometimes asking, as a sensitive director, the collaboration of the people and involving them as protagonists in his process; sometimes building visible interventions such as a chalk powder line drawing of a football field visible only from one specific point of view, where a real one was never built…, near his home village in the South of Italy, Long before the appearance of Nicolas Bourriaud’s well known definition of Relational Art, he started to work as a sort of sensor of emerging social phenomena. Each work is an occasion to make visible situations that are considered troublesome, finding an original way to establish a contact with several “others”. Never close in an introverted position, neither in an ideological one, Enzo Umbaca is every time able to disclose hidden emerging processes and to find solutions that are poetic and politic at the same time. With a similar attitude he also made distinctive works dedicated to reactivate hidden memories, where the act of dealing with memory is, again, never nostalgic, but generously finalized to transform a present situation. Another relevant note is about his ability to find engaging visual synthesis. We worked together the first time in 1994 for his personal exhibition in a non profit space in Milan and later in several other occasions. It is my firm belief that his work is, in the course of time, continuously surprising and moving. Ex post I can say that his work is and was since the beginning free from a sort of self pleased atmosphere rather present in Italian art, and more connected to the urgencies of the international scene. In his first ten years of activity he was considered an outsider, but at a certain point it started to be clear that this sort of light suspicion wasn’t due to the quality of his works but to the local mood. Emanuela De Cecco