In Bari, an entire neighborhood becomes an open-air museum with murals by street artists

In Bari, the QM San Paolo - Quartiere Museale will be inaugurated on Sunday, October 24, which is the art project carried out by the Fondazione Mecenate 90 that involved artists from the local, national and international scene in the execution of ten murals on the facades of buildings owned by Arca Puglia Centrale in the San Paolo district, with the aim of transforming it into an open-air museum. The San Paolo “urban museum-formation” project, based on the outcomes of the study conducted by an interdisciplinary and inter-university research center, is supported by the Municipality of Bari and the Puglia Region with the intention of starting a path of regeneration of places through urban art understood as a tool of beauty capable of improving the physical and social context by stimulating a greater sense of community belonging.

QM - Quartiere Museo San Paolo was born from the intention of the Municipality of Bari to start a path of regeneration of places through the use of urban art, understood as a tool of beauty that can improve the urban context and stimulate greater sense of belonging of the community involved in the process of defining the works, created by international, national and local artists. “With this intervention,” said Mayor Antonio Decaro in July, when the project was presented, “we want to light a beacon of beauty and art on a neighborhood of the city that has always been considered suburbia. When we started thinking about a major urban art intervention, we did not think of any place that was not the San Paolo neighborhood, because of its size, its urban conformation, but also because of the people who live there, who represent a community that increasingly wants to participate in public life and take care of its neighborhood. We are happy to have encountered in this path the expertise and experience of the association Mecenate 90, the support of the Apulia Region and the collaboration of Arca, which immediately showed itself to be an active part of the project by making available the properties it owns.”

“Our hope,” stressed instead Ledo Prato, secretary of Mecenate 90, “is to make the San Paolo, over time, the largest condominium museum in Italy, creating in fact a revolution in the relationship between the center and the suburbs to the point of making this neighborhood an important part of Puglia’s capital, marked by a new and interesting cultural offer. We believe this can contribute to restoring confidence and enhancing the reputation of a neighborhood too often stigmatized, marked yes by important fragilities but characterized by great human and social value.”

Moreover, Puglia is the first Italian region to have passed a street art law for urban redevelopment. “The program,” explained Regional Councillor for Culture Massimo Bray, “uses forms of expression such as street art and tools such as social participation in order to generate cultural development in peripheral areas of our cities. Street art has already garnered numerous feedback through the creation of works of art throughout the region, from Foggia to Salento, and from today it will also know its implementation in the San Paolo neighborhood of Puglia’s capital.”

The artists involved in the project are: Rizek, Giovanni Chiantera, Mattia Lorusso, Davide Casavola, Chekos (Francesco Ferreri), Felice Limosani, Skolp (Nicolò Loprieno), Caktus&Maria, who have been joined by five artists from the national and international scene, namely Italians Ozmo (Gionata Gesi) and Hogre, Australian James Reka and French C215 (Christian Guermy). The project was curated by Stefano Antonelli and Gianluca Marziani. In the coming months, a process will be set in motion that will see the creation of an association committed to enhancing this new open-air artistic heritage so that it becomes a tourist-cultural attractor for the São Paulo neighborhood.

The Oct. 24 celebration is organized in two sessions: the morning event, in the presence of Municipio III President Nicola Schingaro and Councillor for Cultures Ines Pierucci, is aimed mainly at the public of families, school teachers and parents, teens and children and will include a bicycle ride among the works of art by the Franco Ballerini cycling school, with an introduction to the works by experts from Maecenas 90. This will be followed by the inauguration of the exhibition of drawings made by the children of the Don Milani school as part of the workshops curated by Mecenate 90 and hosted at the headquarters of the La Paranza association, and a performance by the Lombardi Middle School students engaged in a rap performance. During the morning, moreover, on the green area pertaining to the ARCA buildings involved in the project, volunteers from Retake Bari and Generazione San Paolo will carry out a civic activism action, cleaning up the area and the wall of the building housing one of the murals, while jugglers from Un Clown per amico will offer a circus performance in the street. Around 12:30 p.m. there will be a concert by street band La Bandita with light refreshments at the end. Beginning at 4:30 p.m., however, in the presence of Mayor Antonio Decaro, Regional Councillor for Culture Massimo Bray, the mayor’s councilwoman delegated to the enhancement of the city’s cultural heritage Micaela Paparella and Mecenate 90 president Ledo Prato, the curators of Mecenate 90, in collaboration with FAI Bari, will illustrate the works of the artists involved in the project.

The program will also include a collective mural reflection Before I die on the aspirations of the residents of São Paulo, following the format of the global public art project that invites people to reflect on their lives, their mortality and to share their desires, which thus become the barest expression of their hopes. The day, which aims to raise awareness among the citizens and residents of St. Paul’s about the value of an initiative that proposes a dialogue between public art and the city, operating a site-specific reflection on the neighborhood’s places, will close with light refreshments by the Majorana Hotelier.

In Bari, an entire neighborhood becomes an open-air museum with murals by street artists

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