StreetScape8

From 12 October to 17 November 2019 the eighth edition of the public project of Street Art and Urban Art will take place in Como in the squares and courtyards of the city.
Contemporary artists invade the city of Como with sculptures and urban installations in dialogue with public spaces.

Saturday, October 12 at 17:00: Meeting on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Campo Urbano at the Hall of Honour of the Pinacoteca Civica.

On October 19th from 11:00 am: Opening and tour StreetScape8 at Pinacoteca Civica, Como.
Presentation of the project with the intervention of the Councillor for Culture Carola Gentilini, the Head of the Royal Mutual Andrea Rosso, the President of the Artistic Committee Michele Viganò and the curators Chiara Canali and Ivan Quaroni.

Followed by a guided tour of the works in the city in the presence of the artists.

The project

StreetScape8, scheduled from 12 October to 17 November 2019, is an itinerant project that aims to make people reflect on the new possibilities of interaction between contemporary art and the urban fabric of the city, which for the occasion hosts works, installations and sculptures in relation to the aesthetics of places.
In this eighth edition StreetScape celebrates the 50th anniversary of the exhibition-event "CAMPO URBANO, interventi estetico nella dimensione collettiva urbana", curated by Luciano Caramel, which took place in the historic center of Como on September 21, 1969 and involved a series of creative artists from various disciplines including Bruno Munari, Ugo La Pietra, Enrico Baj, Gianni Colombo, Gianni Pettena, Giuliano Collina, Dadamaino and Ugo Mulas.
The event was born from the need to bring the artist in direct contact with the community of an urban center, with the spaces in which it lives daily, with its habits, its needs, giving the opportunity for the artist to realize himself in complete freedom and therefore with greater operational potential.

Just as the aim of CAMPO URBANO was to bring the reflection of art, architecture, design and music among the people through radical participative interventions that involved the citizens, so 50 years later StreetScape, taking art out of museums and the normal circuits of fruition of works, i.e. in the squares and open spaces of the city, fits into the tradition of CAMPO URBANO to reactivate a dialogue between art and citizenship and to question the public in its public dimension.

In memory of Campo Urbano

In memory of the 50th anniversary of this historic event, StreetScape8, in collaboration with the City of Como and the Galleria Ca' di Fra' in Milan, presents in the Campo Quadro space of the Pinacoteca Civica, an unpublished work specially created by one of the protagonists of Campo Urbano, Ugo La Pietra. The installation is composed of two photomontages that compare the artist's intervention on the pedestrian area of Como on the occasion of the 1969 exhibition with his analysis of the pedestrian area of Via Paolo Sarpi in Milan, used today for loading and unloading goods in the wholesale market. The comparison is also presented with works that allude to urban living entitled "Living is being everywhere at home".
For Ugo La Pietra, space is public because it is inhabited and living means leaving a trace of one's own passages, knowing their limits, interacting and becoming familiar with them, following them, shaping and modifying them, loading them with meaning, elaborating on unforeseen uses. Living is thus an act of continuous creation and manipulation of spaces. The work will be visible in the Campo Quadro space from 21 September to 17 November.

Together with the work of Ugo La Pietra, only for the day of October 19, will be reissued the work Laundry by another protagonist of Campo Urbano, Gianni Pettena. On September 21, 1969 Pettena laid out in Piazza Duomo some clothes, with which he wanted to emphasize the difference between living and the appearance of a city. The clothes-lines of the clothes washed and spread to dry in the main square of the city, ironically on the static nature of that context, told instead the city in its becoming, in its daily life, in the freshness of living, remembering that the places of officialdom are above all spaces of ostentation of power but also of social contrasts and marginalization.
Also on the occasion of the Contemporary Day of October 12, will be organized in the Hall of Honor of the Civic Art Gallery, at 17:00, a moment of meeting and storytelling with some of the protagonists of Campo Urbano: Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Pettena, and Giuliano Collina. Participation in the meeting will be free.

Artists 2019

In Piazza Duomo, in addition to the work of Gianni Pettena, for the entire period of StreetScape, there is a large sculpture by Christian Balzano entitled It's not true, but I believe it, in collaboration with Casa d'Arte San Lorenzo. The work depicts a bull unusually lying on its back. The taurine symbolism, which in traditional cultures alludes to brute and primordial force, takes on a new meaning here and invites viewers to make the ancient superstitious gesture of touching the attributes of the beast against bad luck.

Considered as a true precursor of Street Art and Urban Art, Francesco Garbelli has completed four public art projects in Como that redefine the theme of civil and street signs. At the Public Baths of the Como Lago Station he inserts a sign that, starting from the traditional distinction of gender man/woman, reflects on the new and transient boundaries of sexual identity. In Piazza Volta he puts on a telephone booth a sign that invites to consider the programmed obsolescence of mobile phones and, indirectly, of the human race that uses them.
In Piazza Medaglie d'Oro, it is still a road sign that reminds humanity how climate change can cause the explosion of the planet from now to 12 years, while in the road sign "Operation Zebra" the graphic design of the pedestrian strips is reported in three-dimensional scale on a barrier for the work in progress.

The Cortile del Comune di Como hosts the work Plinio by Enrico Pantani, a simple and stylized wooden prototype of a horse, presented for the first time at the exhibition "Foreste" at the headquarters of Patrizia Pepe, in January 2018. Its trait is childish and deliberately clumsy, synthetic and clumsy. The wooden sculptures concentrate an ideal form of the animal, with elements that are repeated from one subject to another, building a figurative syntax similar to that of rock paintings.

The path ends with the corten steel work The blackbird has lost its beak or even Fasting on the grass by Icio Borghi at the Chiostrino Artificio. An anthropomorphized blackbird, of human size, sits a little in a secluded, in a courtyard of a city. The work is the result of an initial divertissement on paper by the author who drew a motionless blackbird, which was used as a basis for the disappearance of his beak. In the sculpture, in fact, instead of the beak, there is an empty triangle.

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