Genoa, a widespread urban art museum is born: it's "Imagining Genoa," to think about the city's future

Opening Saturday, October 3, is the new widespread museum Immaginare Genova, an urban art project that comes to life in the streets of the Cornigliano and Certosa neighborhoods. The museum, featuring works of poter art and augmented reality, was born out of creative urban imagination workshops involving a number of groups of girls and boys from middle and high schools in the two Genoese neighborhoods.This is a project curated by the creative hub BASE Milano, Arci Genova, Bepart and Associazione La Stanza, and realized with the support of the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation as part of the CivICa Call for Projects, Culture and Civic Innovation projects. The opening on Saturday, October 3, will include two guided tours, one departing at 10 a.m. from the Genoa Cornigliano train station and one at 3 p.m. from the Brin subway station.

The goal of the initiative is to activate a process of collective imagination, starting with the youngest, that can help reactivate the construction of images of the future for Genoa. The first part of the project involved some groups of children from middle and high schools in the Certosa and Cornigliano neighborhoods in urban imagination workshops to create content through the use of contemporary languages of artistic production such as collage, video, animation and augmented reality. Starting from their own needs and fears, the children defined and analyzed the needs of their city, imagining an outline of the Genoa of desires. Art then becomes a process of learning, emotional processing, development of new skills, a tool for participation and transformation of public space.

The outcome of this path, aimed at raising awareness in children about the role of individual actions in achieving local and global development goals, is, as the organizers state, “the creation of a diffuse open-air museum that reflects on the future of the city, where dreams and reality meet, producing animations that interact with architecture and spaces.” Composed of sticker art and augmented reality works, the museum retraces the crucial points of the two Genoese neighborhoods such as the Former Cornigliano Covered Market, the Valletta Rio San Pietro Urban Park, the Melis Gardens, the Cornigliano Info Point, the Brin Subway Station and the Certosa Municipal Market. By framing the sticker with a smartphone through the Bepart app (available for free on iOS and Android), the work will come alive by staging a dreamy but important civic action. “This is,” the organizers stress, “an opportunity for collective reflection around the ability to imagine a future and the role each citizen can play in this turnaround.”

The idea starts in Milan: last July, in fact, with Imagining Piazza Tirana, 40 girls and boys from Giambellino transformed the face of the neighborhood in the city’s southwestern suburbs, creating a new gathering place and starting point for future cultural projects. The Tirana Square basketball court, colored with street art, digital animations and installations, is the fruit of a participatory project that now remains as a legacy to the neighborhood residents and the community. The alliance between citizens and the creative community has generated a propulsive drive toward rethinking the city, which has turned into a real action of active citizenship. Starting from the example of Milan, Imagine Genoa therefore wants to bet on a virtuous and generative relationship between the Milanese creative community and the operators of the Ligurian city, promoting an alliance for imagination.

Genoa, a widespread urban art museum is born: it's "Imagining Genoa," to think about the city's future

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