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Collaboration, authorship, mediation, collective imaginary, context and monumentality: these are all terms we often use when we talk about art in public space. More than mere words, they are values that over the years have identified languages, practices, and horizons of method and research. Some have made experiments with participation, to give voice to lost stories or marginalised figures. Some have grasped the environment as the indispensable resource for producing innovation and change. Others have conveyed the nature of communities through their artistic work. Each of these approaches has given rise to different forms of monumentality. Yet is also worth emphasising that the intense transdisciplinary and political value of these practices has also made a strong impact on the visual aspect of these works and, along with this, also on their physical and objective element. In many cases, the mediation does not produce a true aesthetic result, which endures over time. If in such cases it may be quite legitimate to refer to them in terms of performance, this is itself a complex question that needs to be defined and articulated in a structured manner.
In these brief notes, my aim is to present the case of an artist who has always inextricably bound “conceptual” and “visual” creation and who finds stimulation for himself, his works and his characters by going out into the streets and neighbourhoods of the world: Andrea Mastrovito. His connection with social practices does not appear an immediate one. Yet many of his projects originate from forms of collaboration which are specifically designed for the realisation of the work. For instance, upon his solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Osnabrück (2018), in a bid to define the meaning of “fear” the artist and the curator Julia Draganović asked the public to suggest books that could be associated with that feeling. The bibliography thus collected then made up the wall used for the projection of Nysferatu — Symphony of a Century. A 2017 film inspired by Murnau’s 1922 work, Nysferatu was completely written (and drawn: it is, indeed, a powerful animation comprising over 35,000 drawings) during a series of workshops aimed at immigrant communities in New York. Compared to the original film, Mastrovito shifted the geographies to two places crucial to our own present, New York and Syria; it would not have been possible to construct a meaningful work if not through the imaginaries and voices of those who, like the protagonist Orlok, experience a painful separation.
Also in the United States, and also in New York, the artist created Kickstarting! (2014), an environmental work created together with children from the Bushwick neighbourhood, in the St. Joseph’s schoolyard. The dialogue resulted in a repertoire of images corresponding to their dreams, which was fixed on the walls through one of the world’s simplest and most familiar acts of play and social gatherings: kicking balls, in this case covered in graphite. In 2019 at Assab One, in Milan’s multi-ethnic Padova district, he launched an international open call to collect books belonging to different places and cultures: from the covers he made 200,000 puzzle tiles with which he composed a permanent work, Babel, a floor made of stories and tales from all over the world.
In the above-mentioned cases, the turn to the outside is aimed at tracing visions through interaction. And yet, it should be said that Mastrovito does not only work through collaboration, and that the extraordinary monumentality of his works is not only characteristic of his participatory projects. In the case of Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontencer (Fundacion Proa – Proa21, Buenos Aires, 2022), he created an enormous installation by drawing on a multitude of rubbish and objects abandoned in the streets of Buenos Aires’s La Boca district. In La diseducazione al reale (2021) he used the disused desks from a school in Bergamo. Lastly, to project the film I Am Not Legend during the monographic exhibition Io non sono leggenda in Pistoia (Palazzo Fabroni, 2020), he decided to use a wall made up largely of books from a women’s prison, which had been destined for the scrap heap. Just like when the artist involves people and their visions, in these cases, too, he seeks approaches and transversal gazes that are capable of breaking out of the usual narratives, and bringing out others that are as true and as real as people or things that male up part of their lives.
After all, every choice and every chapter of Mastrovito’s incessant journey into the nature of the human aims to bring into view that which is marginal —whether that means a child’s dream, the last page of a book (Neverending End, piazza Promessi Sposi, Bergamo, 2014), or the memory of a house that is about to be demolished (Owsiana 1, Gdansk, 2014). Or indeed, the trace of an existence, as happens to the protagonists in revolt of his latest blackboard etchings (the Zero Casualties series, 2021-2023) who, occupying the streets, brandish books (and thus thought) to avoid being erased. On closer inspection, then, it is precisely his characters that make us perceive the contours of the human, political and social architectures traced in each of his works: these are people who experience the world in all its parts, without exclusions. They are ordinary people, though in the most mainstream stories they are left on the sidelines. They are outcasts but are never totally out of context: they move in heterogeneous environments and there are no limits or areas excluded from their wandering. It is precisely this wandering that breathes life into Mastrovito’s artistic story. For him, being in the streets means being outside the confines of the self. It means searching in all places, finding himself in all their stories. It means trying not to lose all that is pushed, by the very force of things, toward dissolution.
