FRESCO'S REMOVAL PROJECT

Is a communication project which analyses the messages characterizing our cultural landscapes both territorially and conceptually.
The city is a huge advertising space used by everyone: pubic bodies reminding citizens their duties and limitations as well as individuals using public communication to simbolize their thoughts often in a creative way - from mural writings to small ads and bill-posting.
The analysis reveals an articulated global communication which picks up all the messages of a city. Their whole creates a single communicating body, a huge slogan made of that number of signs which together compose the collective identifying concept - with all its own rights, duties and consumptions.
A part of these messages relate to wall communication, often identified with wall writing, graffiti or murals.

<Fresco's Removal>, is an action which ultimately results in removing text graffittis from walls in urban territories and transfering them in order to keep them as testimonies of a certain culture.

Goal: to preserve communication by means of signs left on the walls, testifying contemporary thoughts and feelings as perceived or divulgated by members of a community.

The mural messages, connected to political inclinations or parties, cultural, musical and other movements, deeply represent culture in the last decades: an increasing differentiation into groups and a consequent sense of belonging.

The large number of multiple realities makes their codification almost impossible, the only common denominator is the medium used to divulge the messages: the wall.

Mural communication modifies a territory by giving it the distinguishing marks of a collective cultural landscape where the text transmits a sign of presence and reveals opinions.

On the contrary the covering of a sign represents the annihilation of these differentiations and the return to cultural- sometimes moral - homogeneity; it also represents the return to a visual order for those who saw the sign as anti aesthetic or untrendy.

In this direction the cultural analysis of the community and the analysis of the territory's landscape merge in a single tool: if, for the first analysis it is a sure mean to define identities, the same writing represents, even for the second criteria of analysis, an essential mean to catch changes of the urban landscape, with a new aesthetic spirit not necessarily connected to public order.

Mural graffiti, such as other actions made by individuals, give the urban space a strong sense of "use" from its inhabitants: the writing is a spontaneous structure, like travelling stalls, kiosks, shop signs, laundry hanging from lines and balconies (where still allowed) and represents an interaction with the territory, which often delimitates the borders of the resident cultural community to legitimate there sense of belonging.

On the contrary the territory would be anonymous to itspeople and there would be a lack of views which would make everyone feel a stranger in one's own home, social implications included; sometimes even a wall graffiti contributes to solve the short-sighted planning of those who didn't consider the need for spaces for all generations, not only for the most consolidated ones.

A wall is always a blocking of circulation or a limit of property including conceptual limit.

We can consider the same wall from the aesthetic and territorial planning point of view and maybe whithout effigies it appears to be only a "non planned" space for the habit of seing exterior decorations as part of our culture, which is surely oriented towards the common sense of horror vacui.

Maybe the reaction is similar to other works which one sees every day: the many self built which defy legality, illegal sheds and orchards, improvised card games tables, public transport shelters used by prostitutes, improvised barbecues, city squares as skater yards. All are spontaneous structures which, although condemnable for some, compensate for a projectual void for those categories of people normally not included in structural planning.

The thought on aesthetic criteria is still open: some find pubblicity defaces our landscapes, others think of warning signposts put by authorities, some others of wall writings.

We can ask ourselves how many of these wall writings are part of our living and investigate on how many people they represent (tens, hundreds or thousands) and moreover to how many people they are addressed because these writings often are a critic to the most common habits. We will later on think about how long it takes for ruins to become aesthetic, for these to become places of archaelogical interest such as the graffitis of the Berlin wall, now patrimony of all (imagining the white wall without writings can be helpful) and essential to historical connotation.

We consider the relationship between these messages and public art as well: how many public sculptures have been removed after military or social conflicts in the last 50 years and how many of these represented a past which was existing in our collective conscience? How many architectural works and buildings connotated by previous regimes or trends have been eliminated? The writing on a wall represents the same communication, only through a different and less demanding medium.

Maybe this is because there are/were no direct communication spaces between individuals and community without having to connect to a net, a television or an editorial system:all of which are regulated solutions which don't offer the simplicity of a wall. Or maybe because there isn't an hypothetical communication message board between the individual and the community, a big white wall where one can leave useful messages or simply signs of one's opinion or existence.

TECHNIQUE .The project is divided into two parts:
part a
study: the photografic catologue of symbols and graffiti in the form of written text or drawing allows the social monitoring of the community to which they belong.
part b
removal + conservation: the chosen symbols and texts are removed from their original surface and subsequently posed on canvas.
Some information:
1 the chosen drawing/graffiti, the writing or symbol must be consolidated (before it is detached from its original support) with synthetic resines. After one applies glue pastes and gauze to detach it
2 during the following 24 hours the cloth is removed including the part of the wall attached to it
3 the product of this removal (usually 1-2 millimetres thick) is accurately levelled and consolidated with synthetic resines. Later it is glued to the plaster support for its definitive pose.
4 glue paste and gauze are then removed. The result is again consolidated with synthetic resines.

Fresco's removal, is a site-specific intervention which removes writings and symbols from the city walls, places of their original exhibition and moves them inside the exhibiting space.

POST SCRIPTUM. The project is also a theoretical and practical workshop which, from the analysis of territorial communication reaches the theme of cultural preservation, up to the more operational phases which surely involve for the nature itself of the intervention.

CONCEPT. the study presented allows to map the cultural groups which are found on the territory and divided into areas of influence between historical town centres, residential areas and suburbs; analized both horizontally and vertically with particular interest for the linguistic border areas.

In the cities where the project has already begun the analysis has revealed an ample panorama of social and cultural as well as political and consuming trends, very useful to comprehend the values which characterize the community.

Daniele Pario Perra