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Art and Politics
Art and Politics
Conclusions Works of art are never simply aesthetic experiences. An artistic work always contains within it a form of political payback, one interpreted by the artist, but made universal through its representation. In the case of street art, however, the universality of its messages must reckon with the limited temporal dimension of graffiti. If they are not carefully recognised and preserved, these works of art, by their nature, are often destined to disappear: they are painted on walls and left at the mercy of the elements, or are incorporated in their turn into other murals. For this reason, Art and Politics: The Streets of Rome has a twofold goal. The first is to highlight works of street art created in little known side streets of the Italian capital, helping to preserve them and fix them in the public’s memory. The second is to develop their profoundly political message, providing a key to a more structured reading of them. The analyses accompanying the images published here aim to amplify the force of the artworks, and at the same time provide a contextualising frame. The combination of analysis and image sets the aesthetic experience offered by the works of various artists – Solo, Jerico, Manu Invisible, JDL, Diamond, Iena Cruz and Alice Pasquini – within the analyses provided by different experts from the Istituto Affari Internazionali (and elsewhere). This aims to generate broader reflections on the critical issues of our time, such as climate change, questions of gender and identity, and the evolution of democracy. Further, bringing together street art – which by its nature is created as an art of protest, as an attempt to develop
an infra-politics, that is, an expression of dissent beyond the control of authority – with traditional political analysis is fundamental to reconnecting the reader with the political world, understood here as a moment of reflection on how problems afflicting society can be overcome. In a historical period in which mistrust in institutions has led to the growing ascendancy of increasingly articulate forms of anti-politics, the bringing together of figurative art and political science pushes readers to reappropriate a space of civilitas that belongs to them. In conclusion, the exercise to which this book invites us – the interpretation of the analyses via the artist’s eye, and the vision of the works via the voice of the analyst – allows us to reinterpret street art and the most traditional political analysis not as respective aesthetic actions of protest or rhetoric, but as an attempt to reconstruct a sphere of social dialogue and cultural exchange that aids free, critical and constructive thought, and so is profoundly political.
Ferdinando Nelli Feroci President, Istituto Affari Internazionali
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