Irene Pittatore
2016
A word game dedicated to public art and its keywords.
Edition of 4 A4 posters produced on the occasion of the Contemporary Art Week in Turin (2016)
30 € + shipping costs
Order your posters here.
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Public art > A club trip
Urban regeneration > A generation burner
Creative class > Slaves, react! ©
Smart Cities > Racist times
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The aim is to encourage, through a playful device, reflection and critical exchange on key-words of the contemporary vocabularies of city-planners, architects, artists and stakeholders of regeneration programs through art and design.
The project debuted, in 2016, in the form of posters on more than 1,000 public transport vehicles in Turin. The Public Anagrams were broadcast every 30 minutes on the monitors of metro stations and travelled inside buses and trams in the form of printed and digital posters.
The project is part of an ongoing artist’s book by Irene Pittatore, A BOOK TO/BE. A DIY user manual for art practices in urban regeneration$ (Archive Books, Movin’ Up Award 2014): a user manual without instructions that investigates, between Turin and Berlin, forms and consequences of the use of “creativity” by public administration and private investors in urban regeneration projects.
“The project is based on the manipulation and subversion of mainstream slogans describing well-known urban development paradigms and strategies, such as “smart cities” or “urban regeneration”. By mixing up letters and by turning upside-down the slogans, the artist aims at raising critical awareness about the hidden outcomes of urban development strategies. Irene’s anagrams reveal the ghostly dark side of popular and optimistic urban slogans”.
Alberto Vanolo (2018), “Politicising city branding: Some comments on Andrea Lucarelli’s ‘Place branding as urban policy’”, Cities, v. 80, pp. 67-69.
