HERITAGE

Being interested in cultural heritage, making it the central theme of a festival that has always focused on the evolution of urban communication codes, was not a predictable operation. Nevertheless, the motto of the European Year of Cultural Heritage was chosen as the starting point for the "Heritage" exhibition: "Our heritage: where the past meets the future".

Cultural heritage is something that we tend to take for granted. We underestimate its fragility because we believe it to be immutable. Actually, cultural heritage is ephemeral by its nature, not just because of the risks associated with the natural passage of time, but also because it is the result of repeated changes of its function, together with the continuous redefinition of what - year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation - is really important in the eyes of a given social group. In fact, what was important for our parents is not necessarily as important for us.

The Heritage exhibition starts from an observation of the evolving languages of tomorrow's urban communication. It’s a platform designed to observe places - be they real or digital - where art take shape and then flows into a labyrinth composed of four paths, each of which represent a peculiar kind of relation to the passage of time: those who stand in discontinuity with the past, those who repossesses the codes of the past declining them in their own way, those who run forward to the future regardless of the past, and those who, instead, includes elements that that are normally left on the margins. Disobedience, Speedlight, Total Recall and Retromania.                         Antonella Di Lullo & Christian Omodeo

The five levels that constitute the work of UNO are just like theatrical scenes that follow one after another quickly, defining the external space from the internal space of the exhibition. The succession of fluo colors and geometric shapes, typical of his artistic research, reorganizes space and fruition time of the exhibition. 

We have no choice in front of our eyes: we just have to take the long corridor without knowing what will be there at the end. Labirinto semplice, created in the long corridor that sarves as the central axis of the pavilion (designed by Studio Orizzontale ) is the work of Motorefisico for Outdoor Festival.

A zero-form, a timeless form, autonomous, with a life of its own, which appears to the public through dark and heavy cloths, hidden from the rest of the exhibition, as if it wanted to be preserved and shown only to those who share a desire for research towards new horizons, towards a new beginning. The Quiet Ensemble stages a transformation and mutation; we don’t know if it is a primordial form or a new matrix and minimal aesthetic code arisen after a total reset of the past. The spectator is invited to observe this essential, uncontaminated new world – which comes to life right at the end of the different paths of the exhibition related to heritage – as an ethereal presage.

The #MeToo feminist movement, which spread virally at the end of 2017 on social media, brought back the role of women in modern society at the center of international debates, giving visibility to a vast number of instances of harassment and sexual violence. Wasted Rita has been interested in women’s rights for years, creating slogans and drawings that she shares on the web. If there is something in our cultural heritage that Wasted Rita prefers not to transmit to future generations, it’s this unjustified imbalance that exists between men and women. 

Behind the growing success of street art are often mechanisms that transform the artists into an instrument in the hands of galleries, institutions and media. In a market that is interested both in the economy of attention and in the sale of artworks, the street artist is a perfect low-cost toy. He distracts, entertains, sets trends, attracts likes and followers and has no big economic pretensions. 

During his stay in Rome Mathieu Tremblin was attracted by the stickers. Walking through the streets of the city he became aware of the massive presence of stickers, which he then detached from poles, shutters and walls, before splitting them into three different categories: those with Roman slang, the ubiquitous ones that advertise “Serrande” (shutters) and “Traslochi” (relocations) and those of football fans. 

It is enough to see the Berlin Kidz sliding down with a rope from the roofs of Berlin illegally paint buildings – or to observe the painted masks of their metropolitan tribe, or watch them ride the subway cars while risking their lives – to understand that graffiti are no longer a child’s play as it was in the 80s. Like surfing, snowboarding or mountain biking, graffiti has become an extreme sport practiced for pleasure as much as to feel the adrenaline flowing in the veins. Over time, they have become structured, giving life to an industry that produces cans, streetwear, events. 

If we were to define Paolo Buggiani with an element it would be, without doubt, fire. His parable begins in Castelfiorentino, near Florence, where he was born in 1933, and continues in New York, where Paolo Buggiani moved in 1962 and where he became an integral part of that movement that began to be called Street Art, as reported in the book published by Allan Schwartzman in 1985. His production of those years, partially displayed in this exhibition, consists of sculptures, performances and photographs, which he exhibits both on the street and in the galleries, alongside other artists he meets and with whom he bonds: Keith Haring , Richard Hambleton, Ken Hiratsuka and Barbara Kruger. Despite the passing of the years his loyalty to disobedience and fire remained immaculate, almost as much as his recurring to mythological figures of Antiquity such as Trojan Horses, sword-wielding Minotaurs or the Icarus speeding in traffic on roller skates.

It is difficult to understand why in New York it is enough to leave the house with the camera, to be able to make shots destined to become icons of your time. In the world capital of street photography, alongside famous names such as Bruce Davidson, Martha Cooper, Jamel Shabazz or Brina Nobili, 

Through the investigation of books and engravings from the 19th and early 20th centuries that she hunts and collects patiently, Madame re-elaborates the formal heritage of the past, attributing a new and modern meaning to forms that have survived the passing of time. Moving to Rome she was interested in the representation of the human sense of piety, trying to imagine an atheistic version of an iconography that – in the urban imagination – is almost always imbued with religiosity, leaving behind herself both the vatican statue of Michelangelo and the Pasolini’s portraits of Ernest Pignon-Ernest appeared on the walls of Rome in 2015. Moving in the wake of the thought of the art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929), Madame focuses on the meaning of visible forms, aiming to understand what they say about the men and women who produce them and venerate them, rather than simply observe how they represent reality.

Scorpion Dagger, canadian, has become known on the net through his animated gifs in which he inserts characters taken from paintings (often sacred) of the Renaissance (mainly Nordic) making them move to narrate us – and ironically make fun of – our present, 

Through his drawings this artist gives voice to his thought, becoming a reflective eye on today’s China, a vast country that in the past two decades has almost lost its cultural heritage in favor of a violent industrialization. Not defining himself as an agent of change but just a curious observer, 

Participating in two of the four paths of the exhibition (Total recall and Disobedience), Rub Kandy offers us the construction of a new city starting from scrap elements left by a centuries-old city.

The work of Leonardo Crudi speaks to us through a nostalgic aesthetic of the past, inextricably linking society, as an organized and stratified institution, to the man and to the work he has done to create his own patrimony. 

Classic dance is a stop motion video that juxtapose a classic 90’s dance music track and a succession of pictures of classical statues, simulating a choreographic television ballet. The function, as well as the original sacral and rhetorical aura, is lost, and through the movement the statues are being rendered in a fun and ironic way. The sampling of statues ranges between ancient and modern classicism: mythological figures, ancient divinities, olympic athletes, caryatids, noblewomen, renaissance putti and nineteenth-century characters chosen only for their posture or position as a function of this choreographic ballet that celebrates (or criticizes) the emptiness of our time.