
First representative of this category could be Roadsworth, a canadian artist who plays a funny game with road paintings, choosing a delicate irony to change the meaning of signs, as he explains:
“In the spirit of Marcel Duchamps, all I had to do was paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa so to speak, to introduce a glitch in the matrix.”
In the same line, we could talk about Mentalgassi, a Berlin-based artists collective in which work we can find the same easiness and vivacity in surprising us with the common urban furniture we (don’t) see everyday.
With a similar spirit, Rebar studio, based in San Francisco, turns our parking lots in small gardens for a day. They call this practice ‘tactical urbanism’, which means short and temporary changes in the surroundings, as a spark of a bigger transformation of the environment. The particular aim of this last work is a bit more critique and has a long-term project in the background, but it indeed succeeds in the process of decontextualization of common street elements and use them in a different way from the one they were originally thought.
In the same line of critique aim to wake up people responsibility are positioned interventions like Guerrilla Gardening and similar, that are luckily becoming more and more common in our public space.
Having or not a big, maybe commercial project in mind, but nevertheless always looking for the good spot, because they want people to notice their work, artists surprise us everyday with their interventions and give their contribution, I believe, to the richness of the city in its contemporary form.
In collaboration with Unlocked, we explore the future of hybrid space and how the cultural sector and events industry can reap the benefits of this new urban frontier in the post-COVID city.
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