the street is our gallery

New amazing works of Street art have been realized in the neighbourhood of Sant’Elia by urbanKofa, Rosaria Straffalaci, and Roberta Congiu together with the community. Art and sociality marked the first part of Cagliari Urbanfest. Neighbourhood residents and volunteers from across the city joined the artists, shared their thoughts on the quarter, and actively participated by holding brushes and rollers to help paint the walls.

The week spent in via Schiavazzi has been intense, full of collective energy and colours: urbanKofa spray painted the mural “Connessioni” on the E-Distribuzione electrical cabin next to the Nanni Loy Primary School. Along the four walls of the cabin, whose background recalls the colors of the sea, two female faces now stand out looking in opposite directions, towards the past and the future, and hands holding out threads, as if to mark the roads traveled and those still to travel, our ideas and those of others that influence the course of our lives.

The mural embodies the courage to express our ideas and defend the right to participate in realizing the future. UrbanKofa mural is included in “Cabine d’Autore”, urban regeneration, sustainability, and proximity to communities’ project promoted by E-Distribuzione. The hundreds of works present throughout Italy represent an open-air museum, still under construction, to color the electricity network with new energy which thus also becomes an artistic network.

Rosaria Straffalaci and numerous volunteers created the work “Legàmi”, a multi-material mural that runs along the surrounding wall of the Confraternita di Misericordia. People of all ages collaborated in the various executive phases: the cleaning and preparation of the wall, the creation of multiple colorful shapes, the installation of the panels made with recycled fabrics that recall a kite flight, and the fixing of intense blue ropes that seem to draw on the wall a score, whose music was composed by the community. This collective work simultaneously enhances those elements that represent the history of the neighbourhood and the innate sense of creativity of everyone.

Listening to and collecting thoughts, observations, and hopes of the inhabitants of Sant’Elia was Roberta Congiu’s participatory art project “Impressions”, which was created with signs, markers, and a camera. People began to open up and share their impressions of the neighbourhood, the beauties of the area, the problems to be solved, and what actions would be needed to build the future of Sant’Elia. Then, they wrote down their words, which were fixed in the shots by the artist. The complete work will be presented at the Castle of San Michele next January.

The first part of Cagliari Urbanfest concludes with this first week of urban interventions. The festival will continue in January 2024 with three visual arts exhibitions hosted at the Castle of San Michele, Temporary Storing of the Bartoli-Felter Art Foundation, and Spazio e Movimento, and it will end with two days of meetings to be held in Sant’Elia and the Castle of San Michele.

Cagliari Urbanfest partners are Fondazione di Sardegna, E‐Distribuzione, Orientare, Fondazione per l’Arte Bartoli Felter, Manca Spazio, Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger |KBH.G, Spazio e Movimento, LILA Cagliari, Parrocchia Sant’Elia, and Confraternita di Misericordia di Cagliari-Sant’Elia. Media partners: YouTG.net, Blocal ‐ Travel & Street Art blog, Street Art Cities, and I Support Street Art. With the patronage of Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, Presidente del Consiglio regionale della Sardegna, and Comune di Cagliari.

Photos by Massimiliano Frau; “Legami Rosaria Straffalaci at work” by Alice Agus.

More information and news:

www.associazioneasteras.it/cagliari-urbanfest/

Facebook: @CagliariUrbanfest – Instagram: @cagliariurbanfest