Rome, Street Art for Rights for the UN 2030 Agenda returns. Second edition kicks off

Street art in Rome to promote sustainable development through art. That’s the aim of Street Art for RIGHTS, which returns to the capital from Wednesday, Dec. 8 to Saturday, Dec. 18, to sign its second edition and score six more of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN agenda. Following the first edition dedicated to the first three goals of the U.N. 2030 agenda, Quality Education (Goal 4), Gender Equality (Goal 5), Clean Water and Sanitation (Goal 6), Clean and Affordable Energy (Goal 7), Decent Work and Economic Growth (Goal 8), and Business, Innovation and Infrastructure (Goal 9) are this year’s themes. It will be street artists Ria Lussi, Porthole, Virginio Vona, SteReal, Hoek and Tea Boy + Sart and Micidial Crew who will set the “goals” of this new phase.

All artists from different areas of the national and international contemporary urban art scene, chosen for having made art a tool for civic engagement. From the suburbs of Settecamini to the Tuscolano district, from the Metro B Laurentina station to that of San Paolo, the artists will return, each from his own personal point of view, a powerful image on the key concept of sustainable development, from which arise all the actions that can be put in place by institutions, companies, individuals. The project, conceived and directed by Giuseppe Casa and curated by Oriana Rizzuto, is organized by the cultural association Taste and Travel in collaboration with MArteSocial and MArteGallery and includes a three-year program of activities aimed at the future creation of an open-air museum, public and free, outside the capital’s most beaten paths. During the festival, as the artists begin to work on the works, the involvement of the entire community is planned, who will be able to share ideas, stories and proposals with the artists during the creation of the murals through a series of workshoptalks with the artists open to all scheduled from Thursday, December 9 to Sunday, December 12 in Settecamini.

The artists’ goals and projects

Goal4 - Quality Education (in collaboration with Museo delle Periferie, and Fondazione Paolo Bulgari): artist Ria Lussi, at the Cicerone complex of the “Rita Levi Montalcini” Institute at Tuscolano, proposes a triptych dedicated to the fight against ignorance imagined by Giordano Bruno in Lo spaccio della Bestia Trionfante. Lia Russi in these terms decides to personify the theme of education with the three characteristics such as ignorance, inertia and bestiality, which people must drive back so that culture and education can be shared and experienced by their social context of belonging and can produce a more equitable and conscious society.

Goal 5 - Gender Equality (in collaboration with Alinea): the artist Oblò (Giulia Bernini), a graphic artist, illustrator and designer from Livorno), at historic Ater lots in Settecamini, has chosen a tribute to Yayoi Kusama: the 92-year-old artist, among the most recognized worldwide, is in fact also a ’feminist icon, both for the themes she deals with and for the value of her struggle against sexism, prejudice and mental illness.

Goal 6 - clean water and sanitation: the young Milanese street artist SteReal at the historic Ater lots in Settecamini, decides to use his way, very close to realistic representation and dear to human figuration, to propose the theme of water and sanitation. The artist’s interest in gestures and the choice not to draw water, but rather to draw the work, the movement connected to an action that leaves one thinking a lot about the cultural imagery of rural Italy when running water was still not had and was taken at the well - or as it still happens today in several countries around the world.

Goal 7 - clean and accessible energy: the three Roman artists Salvatore Sart, Hoek and Tea Boy, at Metro B station San Paolo are tasked with representing the creative soul of their neighborhood, all three of them from the local area and asked to create a depiction representing the idea of a sustainable landscape. Their operation, which is simple and intuitive, allows them to imagine a very broad goal such as the one suggested of clean and accessible energy. The two works, in the walls of the Metro B pedestrian tunnel at the San Paolo station, despite using a common palette decline the theme differently: Sart in a schematic and essential way proposes naïve, very evocative landscapes where the shapes and lines are united by a general simplicity; Hoek and Tea Boy, on the other hand, prefer to create a scene very close to the composition modes of writing by joking about the theme and composing the story through the inclusion of nice characters of invention that evoke in the surreal imagery of figuration renewable energies such as wind or water power.

Goal8 - decent work and economic growth: Micidial Crew at the Laurentina station of Metro B, in collaboration with ATAC. Goal 8 will be illustrated by the project’s only collective, Micidial crew, which is unsurprisingly chosen to portray the Goal dedicated to work and economic growth. The group’s idea is to create a multi-handed work depicting a scene taken from Oliver Twist from a Charles Dickens novel to connect both figuration and collective action to a sense of work close to a sense of community and shared and respectful labor dignity in which everyone takes a balanced part in the creation and growth of a single idea, in this case a single mural.

Goal 9 - business, innovation and infrastructure: Virgilio Vona , an artist, Roman by birth and French by adoption, in Settecamini, chooses to depict Goal 9 by setting the scene in an unreal, innovative and futuristic city. He juxtaposes angular figures created by swirling, elusive lines with cold, purplish colors, recalling shots that resemble Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s The Prisons of Invention series. Vona imagines the city of the future by mixing cinematic suggestions with his own personal dystopian taste, leaving it up to the viewer to choose whether the final work is a real or imaginary scenario, present or future.

All the works will be created with special attention to the environment, thanks also to the use of special AirLite paints capable of absorbing pollutants and transforming them into inert substances through a chemical process activated by sunlight. Each mural will also be marked with a QR Code that will provide more information about the artists and the works, the characteristics of the places, and the goals to which they refer, promoting the dissemination of the values on which the event is based. Thefinal inauguration of the murals is scheduled for Saturday, December 18, 2021 in Settecamini, with an entire day dedicated to the contamination between artistic genres, which has always been a central element in the MArteGAllery project that has organized two performances in Settecamini with artists India Baretto (aerial acrobatic dance) and Uscite d’emergenza (contemporary dance).

Rome, Street Art for Rights for the UN 2030 Agenda returns. Second edition kicks off

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