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In Germany, Year Zero (1948), little Edmund Koehler treads like a stray dog through the streets of a bombed-out Berlin. His steps seem to venture through the ruins of a disused film set. This is surely a paradox, seemingly as far from the poetic universe of neorealism as it gets. There is, in fact, no fiction in the films of Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti of those years. The streets are the streets, the skies are the skies and even the people are the people. Not actors, but women and men inseparable from the witnesses of that time and its tragedies. A fiction was something horrendous, criminal and dangerous — and existed out in the world, in the rhetoric of fascism, in Goebbels’s propaganda. The fictions that ended up with ashes were the underpinnings of the great theatre that was the Third Reich. The swastika-emblazoned red flags raised to the sky, the stadiums packed out for rallies, the tide of extras in brown shirts — all this was enough to put to shame all the American blockbusters of later years. It was a great theatre of death, but first and foremost a great theatre. And when the theatre went up in flames — as in the finale of a Tarantino film[1] — what was left over was the street, full of disoriented people, the ones who survived, those who not buried under the red-hot rubble.
For the West, the end of the twentieth century coincided with a complex phase in its history. A last moment of presumed splendour, a narrative somewhat chained to itself, out of time and out of place, suspended between three controversial American presidencies (the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations). Added to these, in 2001, was the presidency of the second Bush — and indeed he seemed like an alien, a shadow of the old century stretching over the new. This new century reasoned according to different categories, but soon became entangled in a fight against terrorism that seemed to hinder other, more urgent and decisive struggles. All this took place in a context that looked like a remnant of colonial globalism, though this latter had in fact long since been replaced by a globalism of ethics, in the feelings and the the everyday lives of citizens. Added to this was the growing disquiet — though not yet full awareness — generated by the doubt that the digital revolution was essentially leading more to isolation than connection, that the great arena of social media, with its din of millions of indistinct chats, would stifle any construction of shared hypotheses and reasoning about our future.
Perhaps this was why — in a moment when in institutional and urbanist terms the concept of public space was heading into crisis — an entire generation decided to pour its urgent concerns out into the street, into the arena of real life. Historically, the two peaks of this complex parabola are marked by two events, corresponding to the G8 in Genoa in 2001 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. At the time, the first of these events, with all its dramas, presented itself to the world as something hard to identify: it would take twenty years to grasp its deeper meaning. Back then, we were still in a world where television was the space where every diatribe, every discussion, touched earth. Crises began and ended on TV, indeed so much so that in those years one programme on public broadcaster RAI was rechristened “the third chamber” of the Italian state.[2] This did, in part, give a sense of how unprepared the country’s forces of order were to cope with the righteous protest that spread through the streets of Genoa. It expressed a deep inability to handle a phenomenon that appeared to echo past historical moments in which the street was citizens’ last line of defence — from the French Revolution to the protests over the two-decade-long massacre in Vietnam. But what happened in Genoa is history: a black page which, in this context, nonetheless helps us to understand how already in the first year of the new century, the street was transformed into an unexpected instrument of political mediation.[3] The parabola ended in 2020 and the following months. That was the moment when the traumas of the pandemic, of isolation, of remote connections, of distance learning,[4] highlighted the indispensable value of public space in the construction of a society, of its rituals and of the manifold and far-reaching consequences on the behaviour of every citizen. This remains true even though they showed this in a negative way, i.e. by shedding light on the effects of the forced suspension of this space. Everything else comes in between these moments, from Fridays for Future to the destruction of public monuments in the capitals of the democratic West — echoing, albeit in a somewhat sinister and caricatured way — the demolition of statues upon the fall of totalitarian regimes in the Middle East or in once-Soviet territories — to the street clashes prompted by the deaths of black citizens, and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is thus hardly surprising that the art of the last quarter-century has followed two essential guidelines: that linked to the performative dimension and, above all, that relating to participatory art, as theorised by Claire Bishop in her Artificial Hells.
Within this landscape, Italy is a special case study. While in the rest of the world television and the mediahave been political messengers, in Italy they were officially fused with politics for at least two decades, through the power built up around Silvio Berlusconi. This produced an even more excruciatingly urgent need: that of finding a way out of the infinite game of mirrors that near-perfected the paradox of the society of the spectacle. In the art of the twenty-first century, this urgent need has helped consolidate the relationship between the Italian and international scenes, in the reading and perception of global phenomena. In this sense, the artists who have been active since the early 2000s have given form to a Italian perspective which is specific, meticulous yet also integrated into a cultural debate with a more international scope. But when delving into this phenomenon, we should also note the differences that exist in the idea of public space in different climes, on account of their different histories. For instance, in the US case, reflection on public space and on the value of the “street” is relatively recent; it is linked to a programmatic thought, answering the need to mark out the map of certain large metropolises — as we strikingly find in the example of the construction choice behind Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. Yet when we turn to countries such as France and Italy, the street has never been a place in need of designing. Rather, it is the great sea from which anomalous waves have risen, capable of making and unmaking everything around them. In the case of Naples — and it is no accident that this is such an important city for twenty-first century Italian art — the street has been able to create an outright social ecosystem, a space of mutual relations which (in between the dark shadows of illegality, and beacons of solidarity) present an alternative to the deep shortcomings of the state.
In Italy, with the beginning of the twenty-first century and the mounting crisis of Berlusconi’s media totalitarianism, the street again reclaimed its role as the public space par excellence. That is to say, a space of reality and dialogue, especially in art, which had missed the train of postwar neorealism and only recovered a “streetwise” attitude in a few manifestations of arte povera. Even these latter were more linked to the rituals of ‘68 than to the need to restart from the tabula rasa produced after the crumbling of grand illusions. From such a climate ─ the wobbling and then collapse of a propaganda pervading every level of social communication — approaches developed in which the street turned out to be the essential drivernot only of practices, but also of the dynamics of relations with the public and of the conveyance of contemporary art.
There are many, almost countless, examples of this, and it would be difficult to cite all of them. But to consider them in their great mass allows us to grasp that this does not merely correspond to a common element of many poetics, but rather appears as a suspended note, a tuning fork, that aligns them all in harmony. Considering the generation born between the end of the 1960s and the mid-1980s, we can at least mention Giorgio Andreotta Calò, whose performance Genoa Ventimiglia Genoa (2013)[5] , realised on the same streets crossed by the G8 march in Genoa, was recently mentioned in these pages. But we can also cite, by the same artist, the powerful sculptural work realised at the Carrara Biennale in 2010, and the iconic video Volver (2008) in which a boat suspended in the air steers over a grey Milan. The necessity of the road as a journey, but also as the thread of a thought that embraces the social and civil space of Europe, is the theme of the work presented at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the product of a journey on foot between the Netherlands and Italy along the routes that connect the two countries. The examples from the Venetian artist serve to illustrate a rather commonplace attitude of using the road not as the object of specific research, but as a real plane of poetic development. The same attitude can be seen in the work of Ettore Favini, who has conducted long-enduring research into the street, its meanings and its stories. Eugenio Tibaldi, for his part, has literally inhabited the street in his approximately twenty years of residential activism in the Neapolitan hinterland, registering the symptoms of the sentiment harboured in this country through a reading of the excrescences, superfetations, and abuses that the communities of the peripheral areas conduct upon the body of the urban space, outlining a paradoxical perspective on its essence as public space.
There are many other artists we could mention. One is Margherita Moscardini, who has in her own way identified the street as the place where the fragments of history leave their many-layered traces, as in the scene of an accident or, worse, of an assassination attempt. Then there is Andrea Mastrovito who, in recent years, has created grand, almost epic friezes, in which the street becomes a landscape in which the history of humanity or even the history of these tormented years unfolds. The street is also an essential element in the poetics of artists such as Marinella Senatore and Giuseppe Stampone. Especially in their public art projects, both these latter focus on using the street as a site of encounter and engagement between human beings. The street is also a persistent presence — incisively and with a certain constancy — in the works of Elisabetta Benassi, Botto e Bruno and the Neapolitan duo Bianco Valente. As well as being a theorist of a neorealist approach to the visual arts, Gian Maria Tosatti has based the poetics of his great cycles of environmental installations on the street and on the encounter with its inhabitants, going so far as to converge the concept of a portrait of the city with that of an existential portrait of a community. This tendency to narrate the human through public space can similarly be found in the works of Simone Cametti, Francesca Grilli and Rosa Barba. The generation of artists around their forties has developed a reciprocal relationship with the street: it has experienced the street by participating in the moments of protest in which it was a protagonist, and has used it, celebrated it, as an essential narrative device, as the “zero degree” of a reality that shows its sharp outlines of clarity, between the two disturbing clouds of televisual distraction and the stormy, obscure digital mare magnum.
[1] Inglourious Basterds, 2009.
[2] The expression, which cannot be attributed to a particular reporter, refers to the programme Porta a Porta, hosted since 1996 by journalist Bruno Vespa.
[3] On this, see also the article Francesca Disconsi and Francesca Guerisoli, There Are Other Worlds, but They Are in This One. The Road as a Centre of Action on the Future, in Quaderni d’arte italiana, VI, 2023, pp. 64-68.
[4] The “distance learning” implemented by schools in Italy and much of the world during the lockdownsbrought to light many social pathologies resulting from the separation of individuals from social rituals. Several studies have been published on this, from Chiedimi come sto (led by Ires Emilia Romagna and promoted by the Rete degli studenti medi, UDU — Unione degli Universitari and the pensioners’ union SPI CGIL) to the United Nations’ Policy Brief: The Impact of COVID-19 on Children.
[5] In the above-mentioned article by Disconzi and Guerisoli.
