Exhibition by Graphic Design – Comics and Illustration students: Francesco Adami, Giulia Alessandroni, Domenico Alfano, Martina Andreis, Aida Boccoli, Sara Cardone, Angelica Cavicchioli, Giulia Cecchini, Angelo Cirigliano, Tommaso De Nardo, Vanessa Di Leo, Elisa Faè, Valerio Fogli, Maria Furlotti, Brando Giannotti, Giulia Locci, Giulia Malpici, Tommaso Mancini, Alessio Mignogna, Gioia Minck, Leonardo Pace, Alessandro Pascucci, Elisa Pierro, Ellis Schilling, Giulio Tavormina, Elisa Tiberti. Curated by Enrico Parisio.
4 – 7 June 2024 – AgorArt – Clivo Rutario, 53 – Rome
Critical text by Enrico Parisio
What is the neo-liberal city? It is a city where all those places for meeting, socialising, sharing are being privatised.
Profit must be extracted from spaces, and any place that does not have this function must be reconverted accordingly. The ‘public city’ is also sympathetic to this vision. On the one hand, there is the rhetoric of formal rights (public health, justice, schools, universities, social and welfare services, etc.), in theory places and services whose access and use is open and free, but which are in fact also privatised: if you have to wait months and years for an ultrasound in a public facility, or to get an identity card, or a court ruling, where is the right?
Only those who pay get.
The spaces traversed by the new generations are spaces of exclusion, in which services are guaranteed for those who can pay, the rest are excluded, pushed away, deported to the non-places of the insignificant suburbs of our cities, among gold shops and slot machines, deserted shopping centres, lowered shutters, dead-end streets.
How beautiful is Rome? Which Rome? The central one, a theme park for barely solvent tourists, or the one in Ponte di Nona, Bufalotta, Parco Leonardo?
RUFA students in the first year of Graphic Design-Comics and Illustration have addressed this issue. Not in a ‘contest’, in a ‘talent’, always formulas of exclusion, of competition, where either you’re out or you’re in, because resources are scarce, and not enough for everyone… on the contrary, the resources of imagination, of sharing, of collaboration, of affectivity have no finiteness, are never scarce and can be produced infinitely.
Surely this generation will not deal with these issues through politics (what for?), but through the awareness of one’s own wealth expressive, relational, creative, both individually and collectively.
GD-Comics and Illustration students’ exhibition “Spaces of the Contemporary” will be open to the public until Friday 7 June. We look forward to seeing you!
