Quaderni d'arte italiana N. 07 #strada

Quaderni d’arte italiana is a quarterly journal, created by the Rome Quadriennale foundation, which is aimed at providing a space for exploring 21st-century Italian art and how it is linked to the various national and international cultural, social and political scenes. The editor-in-chief of the magazine is Gian Maria Tosatti. The editorial board consists of: Nicolas Ballario, Francesca Guerisoli, Nicolas Martino, Attilio Scarpellini and Andrea Viliani. This reflection involves not only the curators who contribute to the many activities of the Quadriennale, but also external authors.

The seventh issue of Quaderni d’arte italiana examines the premise, the pre-text and the context for an entire artistic generation, namely, the generation born between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s: the street. In reality, that of ‘street’ is a broad notion, often associated with the idea of a public space, which is a highly pressing issue against the background of what is known as ‘telecracy’ or ‘videocracy’ and that nowadays could certainly be referred to as ‘networkcracy’. But what is public space in a regime in which representation is continuous? From 1980 to 1994, in Italy, television created a new narrative as the country set out to rewrite its history, shaking off the horrors of its past and, by adopting an imaginative and light-hearted approach, opening up lines of credit that would need to be paid off over the years. In 1994, Italian television demanded and took control of the country through its owner, Silvio Berlusconi. It took nearly two decades to develop an alternative narrative to that of its political leader and media tycoon. This change was driven by the desire to rediscover the notion of public space, but there was also a certain degree of impatience regarding the concept of representation and the rediscovery of the street, a place that had been taboo since 1977. We can see all of this reflected very clearly in a number of artworks, in particular in the ten-year period from 2010 to 2020. In fact, in the 21st-century, streets opened up to artists who walked around them again and found that they were just as they had been left more than 20 years earlier. They were bare, brutal, wounded, and still filled with rubble from the bombing of the Bologna railway station: it was as if the last quarter of a century had not happened, but was instead like a waking dream, disguising the fact that severe stagnation had set in.