Pierluigi Nicolin Born in Bareggio in the 1941 is manager of the magazine of architecture Lotus and teach to the Polytechnic of Milan. Between the books from him published recently we signal: Metamorphosis of the urban plan and Newses on the state of the architecture in Italy. Art and (in) the City The embellishment of public space Let me start with an academic introduction. Before dealing with art in the city, I would like to speak of works of art already existing in the city. I will focus my talk on the big city. I think it is correct to analyze some aspects related to the city of the past, now that a whole process of change has already begun. Even if we refer to a distant past, it's traces have not completely disappeared; on the contrary, they are still visible. What is lacking is our capacity to see them, and it is easy to imagine how many people living in a city (such as Milan, for example) show a very weak and absent-minded perception of the space where they live. This is the reason why I would like to remind you of some features of historical urban space, i.e. space consisting of important buildings of the 17th and 18th centuries. It is worthwhile mentioning, first of all, an aesthetic phenomenon known as "embellissement", i.e. embellishment of the city, which set out a series of changes begun in the 16th century and continued all along the 17th and 18th centuries (until the traditional urban layout changed profoundly at the beginning of the 20th century). We can start with the historical buildings of the Roman Baroque (preceded by the famous plan by Sisto V in the 16th century). Embellishment of the city was the main target of this plan which was also aimed at taking control of the city's space. I would like to remind you that these actions were undertaken only by absolute powers such as the "ancien r‚gime". This is the first time urban space was modified to acquire a shaped form. The same process involved other European cities in the following century (included the colonial cities of Latin America) and led to the creation of the so-called Baroque city. But a true theory of embellishment was developed in France within the framework of the "state" intervention carried out in French cities. I am describing the shift from the mercantile town to the State town which was characterized by the occupation of public space by the French monarchy and the Roman church. The new seats of centralized power represent the decisive element to assert their new aesthetic rites and power. During the Renaissance, the layout of palaces and monuments led to the creation of a public space which was often irregular, as regularity was used in the architecture of buildings. In order to understand the difference between the Renaissance and Baroque movements - as far as the notion of public space is concerned - we should stress the fact that during the Baroque period, the concept of regularity shifted from the architecture of buildings to public space (think of Saint Peter's square by Bernini). This is the reason why irregular spaces were no longer created within public space but, on the contrary, were planned within the buildings themselves. It is possible to recognize a symbolic aspect in the rule of the "regular" by a power that occupies and changes the public space, often controlled by clashing private interests, into a place representing a superior order. The architecture of royal squares in Paris, Nantes, and Lyon are an example, together with public spaces of most European cities of the 17th and 18th centuries. The medieval town is often "demolished," as in the case of the opening of Via Conciliazion in Rome to celebrate the 1950 jubilee, which caused the demolition of Spina dei Borghi. Thus, public space in the past was modified and created by the plastic arts and by architecture. Our notion of public space has changed profoundly, both in regard to the traditional town as well as to the modern city. Public and urban spaces are no longer the places where collective rites are celebrated. Nowadays, public space is constantly under discussion - it may even be called a "non-space" as it has been occupied by commercial facilities and by city traffic. Thus, I will look for some strategies showing a relationship between art and the city, considering that such strategies are to be interpreted as actions undertaken in a space that is constantly under discussion and which are no longer aimed at embellishment. Current strategies What is the possible reaction to the fall of representation in public space brought about by the aesthetics of "embellissement"? How to cope when the tradition of "civic art" fails? A possible solution would be that of interfering with the space itself, to distort it, to produce some sort of disturbance, to fill it with a private message. A solution consisting of placing in the city's crucial points a kind of art that, having developed in private art galleries, needs to express itself in outdoor exhibition sites and could be a meaningful interference to the ritual exhibiting modalities which have to be opposed. An example of such an hypothesis are sculptural installations of Richard Serra. Often placed in topical public spaces, Serra's works are aimed at specifically redefining each site, opposing expectations, aesthetic prejudices, behaviours, etc. Either crossing a road or lying in the middle of the Federal Plaza in New York (Tilted Arc, 1981), Serra's installations represent the transference of private sensibility into public spaces; they raise a political question, interfere with safety standards, impede visibility, deviate ways. Often bound to raise disputes, many of Serra's works are marginalized or sent back to the "controlled" spaces of art galleries and museums or, in the case of the Federal Plaza installation, they are removed. In such a way art is let into the public space in the shape of installation; it constitutes an interpretation of the space, or a contestation of it, or it merely characterizes the space (in the case of Daniel Buren), or it brings about a comparison between the "other" or "high" culture, the culture typical of contemporary art research, and the "low" space, belonging to mass behaviour. In the framework of this comparison, of this pedagogical purpose, conflicts are brought about and expulsion mechanisms are started up. More seldom, the installations become part of the metropolitan background, with its advertisments, its technological superfetations, its traffic signs, its barriers, the technical presence. The attempt to create by using metropolitan dejecta, to operate by adopting the signs of this communicative manifestation in contemporary public space - advertising totems, signs, posters, inscriptions - in order to transmit other messages, is the aim of Barbara Kruger (her work is to be regarded as a criticism of the self-celebrations or collusions with Pop art by Claes Oldenburg). Adopting the same sign-system, the effectiveness of the art message depends on the artist's capacity to call in question that very code, to insert sudden diversions in the message. If by so doing the art is placed in the same competitive field as other messages (mainly advertising messages), it will show its strategies of differentiation. It is necessary to avoid a mimetic interpretation which would have an invalidating effect as a consequence. As for Barbara Kruger, the "standing aloof" procedures can be determined by the message's content - the written, critical, antagonistic, poetic, and the out-of-the-context part. This can be achieved either by operating a diversion in the dislocation strategy or in the strategy of the graphic feed-back of the message, or by adopting a scale shift, etc. Or, on the contrary, because the message improperly occupies a pre- destined space like an electronic billboard in Time Square. In such a case, and in the case of Jenny Holzer's works, sliding by on electronic screens, the piece of art is brought face to face with the urban and territorial communication apparatus, interferes with the graphic information system and introduces visual and textual correctives. By adopting the system of urban communication as a reference point, instead of rejecting it, this work tends to highlight the possibility of an alternative use of the apparatus itself, it operates within that process, pushing it ahead. It also forces the communication system within the contemporary metropolis, in the quest for emancipating experiences. Undoubtedly, the most competitive place in the pressing space of metropolitan communication is the park. Especially in the United States and Northern Europe, a taste for residual spaces has developed, an interest for moribund or deserted places which are worth discussion. Actually, what is generally referred to as "terrain vague" has been for years cause for concern of that kind of culture that, considering this phenomenon only under a social and economic point of view, has turned its image into one of sheer degradation. It is through the interpretation of artists such as Mary Miss that these marginalized places have been taken into consideration under an aesthetic point of view. The area is no longer regarded as a place to get away from but, on the contrary, to be considered with a romantic attitude, an attitude aimed at approaching the sublime, existing in the folds of contemporary civilization.

	Salvatore Falci Born in Portoferraio, in the 1980 has founded (together to Pino Modica and Stefano Fontana) the group of the Piombinesi. Between his principal shows remember the "personali" to the Studio Casoli and in Viafarini in Milan and the share to the Biennal exhibition of Venice of the 1991. I won't be speaking only about my work but also about the Piombino group founded in 1980 and composed of Pino Modica, Stefano Fontana and myself. In our first four years of experimentation we asked ourselves if people's activities in daily life weren't in fact "micro-acts" of creativity. Unlike so many experiments of the Seventies, we wanted to record actions, not reactions, and therefore we wanted to reduce our objects of stimulus to a minimum in order to raise awareness of other, already existing stimuli. In 1982 we created "Sosta 15 minuti" (Standstill 15 minutes) which was first realized in Populonia's Rocca Medievale (a medieval fortress), and then outside the Giardini of the Venice Biennale (1984). Generally the people who go to the Biennale are predisposed to considering and using everything that they meet in an aesthetical way, but, after some hours people become tired and notice that they are missing places to sit. Working upon these premises, we brought colored chairs, ambiguous - because ambivalent - objects, hybrid in that they function as utensils or as contemplative objects. Some used them as simple chairs, but others who noticed them stopped in order to try to understand what they were. There was a continuous alternation between the use of the chairs as utensils and as objects of aesthetical reflection. These seats came in the three primary colours - yellow, blue, and red - plus white and black (the two non-colors), which together created a chromatic variation that functioned as an attraction. Another element was the text "Standstill 15 minutes," an invitation to use the objects with parsimony, a notice that nobody respected but which posed to us a problem. We took 400 photos and designed graphs to show how often the invitation to stay still for 15 minutes was respected, how many men or women sat down, and what color seat was chosen. The experiment was created to understand the natural relationship between an object and its employer (I don't want to speak about spontaneity as the word is too ambiguous). Awareness is already in daily life; it's thus useless put a command in front of a person: "Look! " or "Use!". In our work, the person responded in his or her everyday way. This work helped each of use to further our understanding of directions for research. All three of us departed from the idea of going into the external environment to create the object, not to present it. Nothing came out of our studio that was not a functional project, we never had the intention to affirm: "this object is a work of art". Our objects had the specific function to create a direct interaction with the working public. An interaction, however, that had to have a return. Fontana conceived his yellow boxes (a color that calls our attention) as "ideological containers." These could then be systematized in different urban places, in front of a high school or at a crosswalk... the responses were all catalogued in reports and the results were very varied: from scribbles to objects to whole written pages. After the seats work, Pino Modica tried to understand the relationships people form with an ambiguous object. He built an object resembling a telescope and put it in Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa. Inside there was a line that might have seemed to be a way to measure inclination (in part because we were in front of the Leaning Tower). All those who stopped by offered all sorts of interpretations. It was interesting to see that many who arrived were absolutely sure they could explain the operation. In truth, there was a cine-camera inside that filmed the improper use of the object, and the result was a film with selected shots made by the individuals' attempts to use it. It was a way to substitute the eye of others. Personally, I tried not to utilize objects, but inactive plans, trying to reduce to zero the solicitation created by the object. I was not interested to see reactions, but looked for those actions that are generally not visible. Between 1984 and '85, I placed glass-topped tables in different environments, painting them with a black film that could be easily scratched, and this allowed me to underscore attitudes that are all the more more frequent for being unconscious. Comparing the results, one notes a strong connection between types of handwriting, content, and the place where it occurs. In a cafe, in a pizzeria, or in a steelworks factory, different things happen. I made only seven of these glass-tops but I want to repeat this operation every ten or fifteen years to see if a change happens in each change of generation. The same thing has happened with floors, where there's no longer a "conceptual-cultural" appearance, but upon which in fact natural actions are recorded: walking, the rubbing of feet, or the movements of a chair. It was interesting to begin comparing the floors of a telephone booth and of an elevator, which have the same dimensions: in the first you could see undulating signs, softer because when one is in communication one often leans on one leg and begins to swing and shuffle the free foot, all of which doesn't happen in an elevator, therefore the signs in the latter are decidedly more tense and nervous. In '85/86 Fontana realized "Prove materiali" (Material proofs), which are boxes with insides you could touch. These were arranged in plausable places inside supermarkets, that is, near to shelves so that you could understand them logically. The people touching them began to manipulate them and compose forms with a very natural attitude, beginning with caution, then more and more persistently. Their responses were incisive and natural, precisely because they had no artistic pretensions. In the same period Modica was continuing to work on the ambiguity of the object, creating a videogame that was impossible to use, a labyrinth in which you needed to follow a course with a laser, but after a little bit people got tired and began exiting from the screen. My work in this comic period involved making mattresses with florists' sponges. This sensitive material records even fingerprints, so I arranged these beds in different places: cafes, gyms, beaches, etc., also trying to choose colors suitable to the place. All gradients you see on these surfaces are nothing other than the sum of all the imprints left by the bodies of people who passed. In '89/90 I experimented with grass: I prepared a white forex springboard in front of shops, on which I scattered sawdust mixed with seeds from English meadows, and I expected that the people, while passing, would scatter the mixture. Picking up these springboards and watering them, I found that there, where more seeds met, aggregations were created and grass began to grow. The sidewalk was redescribed in fractals that were in relationship to the moment of action. I repeated the same thing on a small bridge in Venice. At this point I'm going to speak only of my work because in reality the group has dispersed. In a new work I arranged a carpet and black shiny tables in a cafe. At the end of the day I could gather what kinds of situations had happened. I waited for all the dust to fall, and I removed the objects on the tables only afterwards. In this way, a situation was described even if the subjects and objects were no longer present. For another work, in 1994, I put a springboard on the road under which there was a black canvass with a sponge soaked in white paint. I waited for the action of passers-by or cars to intervene, with a principle analogous to that of printing: we could visualize what was underneath. Then I hung these large stripes above the places where any prints occured, and the results this time did not go into a gallery, but stayed in the urban environment that caused it. The road surface tells its wear-and-tear or the symbols that one by one occured (for example, the writings on the city telephone booths that from TETI became SIP and then Telecom). Also, from the reparation of holes in the street one can understand where one is: in Basilea they are perfectly regular, while in Tirana they are filled with all kinds of materials. I want to finish with these last works that don't subtend only to actions that detect something, but rather induce sometimes-forgotten cultural attitudes and habits. In these works there is therefore a recovery and a stimulus, through the function and use of the objects - birdcages, sanctuaries, etc. -, of various anthropologically normal attitudes that the man of the street can, however, decide to refuse. In the birdcages the action induced was that of feeding birds, a rather common gesture, but often inhibited in modern culture. For example, at Mercato Saraceno, in an elementary school where I installed one of these birdcage stations, the students with whom I collaborated were amazed because from that moment they could begin feeding sparrows, something that until then the teachers had prevented. So now we're baiting a gesture, an action, creating the preparations and bringing the didactic function back to the artistic object which in history it has often had.

	Emanuela De Cecco Born in Roma in 1965 it is a critique of art and manager of Flash Art Italy. She has taken care of any shows between which Maps to the gallery Care of, Cusano Milanino (MI), Open 95 (co-administrator) to the Trevi Flash Art Museum. The map, the experience and the symbol Reflections upon art exhibition In January 1996 I set up art exhibition called "Maps 1996" at CARE OF (C/O) gallery in Cusano Milanino (within the framework of a series of workshops organized by the City Council of Milan aimed at offering young artists in the C/O and Viafarini archives the opportunity to show their art). First of all, I inquired as to whether the artists of the youngest generation were still interested in dealing with themes relating to territory and their relationships with their cities. I wanted to know if such art interest was to be attached to an historical period-the seventies-during which a set ideology prevailed and the people used to spend a lot of time in the outside world, "in the streets", to observe and judge their surrounding world-and those who refrained from doing this were looked at with suspicion. The documents of the archives showed art "indoor" attitude among young artists: indeed, they mainly work alone in their own studios or houses, witnessing the state of crisis in the public dimension. Young artists avoid the street. And if from time to time the outdoor world appears in their works it is only episodic or thanks to the good will of a single artist. Public funding is not usually invested in this form of art, and it seldom stimulates public sensitivity towards it. I understand that in this context, the young artist feels a lack of confidence and has the feeling that he or she is fighting against the silence of the institutions and false public opinion. Apart from a few exceptions (Alighiero Boetti, Maria Lai, Franco Vaccari, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Piero Gilardi, who all belong to the past) Italian art is characterised by a lack of public considerations, i.e. artists do not usually include in their works a representation of their own communities. Indeed, there are just a few artists who have chosen to make permanent research on this subject matter. But going back to "Maps" (and to a few participants such as Luca Vitone, Laura Ruggeri, Franco Stanghellini, the Stalker group, the Archivio Umano group and Davide Marchionni), and to the ideas that came before it, I would like to remind you of an art exhibition that had been held a few months before and which I found particularly interesting. The exhibition called "Il Centro Altrove" ("The Center Elsewhere"), held at the beginning of autumn 1995 at the Triennale in Milan, mainly dealt with the relationship between the centre of Milan and its suburbs. Among a large number of architectural projects there was a small section of art which, to my disappointment, focused mainly on abstract works portraying the relationship between the centre and the periphery of art. Real life was completely neglected. I got very angry and I felt like responding to this umpteenth masochistic declaration of art's impotence in the world with a proposal possessing an internal structure capable of opening up for communication without giving up its artistic language. The exhibition "Map" represented an interesting chance to compare different operational types of action and to see a number of different maps. The word "map" is used according to the meaning given to it by Ernst Gombrich, the well-known English art historian in his book The Mirror and the Map: a theory of representation. Here the function of the map is opposed to the function of the mirror and it is used to translate a real-life experience, after decoding it, whose intensity cannot be portrayed by pictures (the mirror). When I speak of maps, I refer to the maps presented by Luca Vitone showing the instruments he uses in his work, or to the list of wastes by Davide Marchionni which is the base of a history told beginning from rubbish; or to the geometry of the city by Laura Ruggeri inspired by the videos on the paths of the Milanese trolleys all along the four cardinal points; or to the world-universe map by the Stalker group showing hollow and full spaces which look like islands and seas and constellations obtained through a difficult research of the free spaces of Milan; or to the map by Archivio Umano which is presented together with the pictures of a group of youth taken on a Saturday afternoon before Christmas, together with its caption explaining from which suburb each of them comes from; or to the mirror by Franco Stanghellini obtained by taking a picture of an outdoor detail to a scale of one to a one. When I think back on the exhibition and on the unavoidable gap between aims and results, I have the feeling that some important elements concerning relationships with the territory were left out. 0n the one hand, the public was not ever taken into consideration during the formulation of the project. The public/person was portrayed in a picture by Archivio Umano, Marchionni, or simply looked at by Stalker and Ruggeri, but was never turned into the main actor, the active element of the work, the member of a community for which the work had been conceived. 0n the other hand, the relationship with the symbolic memory of the territory, either strong or weak, full of events worthy of being remembered or simply the stage of an ordinary life, was completely neglected. The artists who showed their works at this exhibition did the same on other occasions: Vitone in Cologne with a gypsy community, Laura Ruggeri with the inhabitants of 42 Via Bligny, for an exhibition at the Emi Fontana gallery, Davide Marchionni with the children of a primary school for "Aperto `95" at Trevi. However, in "Maps" Luca Vitone presented, as I have already said, the architecture of the industrial area where C/O is located, and Davide Marchionni showed the habits of Cusano's citizens through their waste. Thus, there was no real interest capable of leading towards the identification of a symbolic form of that town's citizens collective memory. This is the reason why the relationship between community and art, together with the formulation of a collective memory, remain two open issues which I would like to deal with in my future projects. All this confirms the difficulties experienced by the artists and the fact that the idea of "public art", in Italy still constitutes a separate category, full of misunderstandings, whose expressions are often on a different track from the one concerning the debate on the contemporary art. This is the reason why I would like to stress the following facts: The Montagna di Sale ("The Mountain of Salt") by Mimmo Paladino, placed in Piazza Plebiscito in Naples for the last New Year's Eve of 1995/96: In Naples whole families used to take pictures on the mountain of salt and the children used to play on it. After a certain while, and after getting permission by the artist, a company in Naples called Napolimania put this salt in small bags and sold them against bad luck (with instructions). In this case, the reference by Paladino to a mythical memory which has no link with the history is a vertical one, which does not clash with the life conditions of the people of this time. In this case, the whole event became an anecdote-as it often occurs in Italy-where tragedy makes way for farce-but this could not be foreseen. The mountain seems to suggest a carnival with an upside-down effect: all is possible for one night but the day after the rules will have to be observed once again. Thus, it is possible and advisable to occupy the city centre provided that the citizen plays along with it. In 1997 it is Kounellis' turn in Naples, and his work of art consists of a huge boat divided into four parts and hung a few metres from the ground. It represents the emigrations from Naples and the way knowledge is gained. Mayor Bassolino said that: "Every Napolitan will have the feeling I experienced when seeing how Kounellis has been able to build a beautiful and noble work using apparently ordinary and poor materials, or even wrecks". Thus, even nowadays the art seems to be confined within ordinary standards such as emotions, beauty and nobility... Milan, July 1996: Twenty years have gone by since a toxic cloud was released from a chemical plant in Seveso. From an interview given by the mayor of Seveso (July 1996) we learn that that area is still owned by the same multinational corporation, Icmesa, which was responsible for the accident. We also learn that the area has recently become a park, called Parco delle Querce (Oaks Park), (it seems that the area is still slightly contaminated) and that there is not even a plaque in memory of the accident. According to the mayor of Seveso: "There is no need to remember that," and "The memory as it is conceived by the ecologists is depressing", "We cannot keep on remembering a sad event belonging to the past". He ends up saying that his attitude is shared by the majority of the Seveso's citizens. Not bad with regard to memory and the relationship between community and history. I wonder whether it is true that the memory is depressing and if coming to terms with the wounds of the history is still a must or not. I would like to end my speech informing you about a competition concerning the creation of a monument announced by the City Council of Campobasso which enables me to make a few comments on what public authority still thinks an urban creation should aim at: decoration and beauty. Indeed these two words are often repeated in the announcement and they are refered to as the keys to meet the requirements of art and the desires of the public. Conclusion: am convinced that art can contribute to the change of social relationships. I also think that it is an engine of direct experiences and for this reason it may play an active and alternative role and replace the mass media (see the observations by Hakim Bey in his book Immediatismo in which he praises the immediate experience as the only form of freedom and alternative to the mass media) provided that it does not humbly give up coming to terms with the context where art is created and does not relinquish a critical attitude towards its institutional clients. I would like to form a group of research on these issues and I invite those who are interested to join me.

	Stefano Arienti Born in Asola (Mantova) in 1961. We between the principal shows signal the biennal exhibition from Venice in the 1991, Cocido y crudo to the Center Reina Sofia from Madrid, and the "Personali" to the Guenzani Study in Milan; Jay Gorney, New York; and Minini, Brescia. In the summer 1996 I had the opportunity to develop a particular project for a particular zone in the city of Turin. In my first on-site investigation I saw no possibility of intervening in any usual or explicit way with regard to the place-the riverside between the bridge that goes to the church, Chiesa della Gran Madre, and the park, Parco del Valentino, right in the center of town-but I accepted the challenge nevertheless. The Associazione per ll Valorizzazione dei Murazzi del Po (a society for the utilization of the Po's walls), together with the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l'Arte Contemporanea, asked me for an outdoor intervention in a place with a very important history and meaning for the city. So we're dealing with an environment characterized by water, something very natural, and at the same time in contradiction to the rest of the historical center. Human occupation of the Murazzi, particularly at night, makes it a chameleon-like place, desolate in the daytime, but crowded at night. The night life finds itself concentrated principally here, not without some not so simple problems of public order. I also had to confront a pre-existing and very bulky artistic intervention: a sculpture-portal of wood and Styrofoam 26 meters tall, a Turinese sculptor's work which we discussed dismantling. In the need to decide I found myself facing a dilemma: to realize a work that was visibly present, if not monumental, or to work in the negative, to subtract or somehow remove the art from there, to avoid adding anything superfluous, to try instead to furnish only cues, desires, and services, provided that they were contextual to the place. The vaguely Pyreneesian architecture along the riverside gave me a hand. The architectural space together with the vivacious, multi-ethnic crowds that gathered there at many squares and night-spots already characterized the Murazzi sufficiently. As an artist I wanted to put my knowledge at disposition not to model new sculptures, but to remove what was already there and replace it with something more mimetic. So I began to think of a list of possible things and I continued to plan only with lists, and as such I managed to avoid, as much as possible, any graphic indication of the project. The final result was a definitive list of 17 "suggestions," desires, and additional services for a place in which I didn't feel it was up to me to add an extraneous artistic presence. Perhaps the result is not necessarily artistic, perhaps it is something else, but it doesn't matter. The Murazzi from the top: Column for a stylist Nudist afloat area Plates of oxidizing copper Reptile room in rubber Glass showcase of lost and found animals Ossary Hunger cage Zone interviews Dump for mirrored materials Collection bins differentiated by color Insect houses and apiaries Cold water showers and atomizers Sleep afloat zone Multi-religious crib Polytheistic clock Sign language area Direct slide river road It was necessary to involve the city council of Turin for authorization and help to realize my project, which I would have considered finished even with the realization of only one of the suggestions on the list. Fortunately, a good part of the list was realized, even if the "official" contribution was neither nimble nor quick. The project was presented through the creation of prototypes or studies in one-to-one scale, rather than in sculptures. Moreover, it was very interesting to discover the way in which the my vague indications were translated into objects. Form, dimension, and choice of materials were largely decided by the people who frequented the Murazzi, and in this way it was intriguing to interpret the contents of the list, always making choices according to place. A very visible work of art would have probably been viewed as an extraneous element. That's why, instead, I thought about inserting things that could be used by the people, or recognized as contextual elements of the environment. It's often much more important to invent the systems in which art can be removed. This idea reminds me fondly of a computer work by Umberto Cavenago which dismantled new monuments around the city of Milan, or other works subtly involving the public by artists' groups from Piombino. Or else, remaining close to home once again, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio's program entitled "Territorio Italiano." To leave many determining decisions up to others in the realization of the list was very stimulating; for instance, it seemed symptomatic that any suggestions involving nudity, sex, and multi-ethnic participation were eliminated, such as "Nudist afloat area", "Zone interviews", and "Multi-religious crib." Paradoxically, they easily realized the grislier and more dramatic suggestions such as "Hunger cage" and "Ossary." The only element that in the end demanded a more direct intervention by me was what on the list is referred to as "Column for a stylist." It seems to me very indicative that the intervention for which I most felt compelled to use my skills was in the dismantlement of the work of another artist. Perhaps this is because to remove or reconvert already-existing art demands more exquisite artistic competence. I re-used a small structural part of the "big sculpture" already in work, a twelve meter pillar, by adding a Styrofoam capital that I had to personally design. This entire project brought to mind the famous film by Bu¤uel, "Simon of the Desert." Contemporary art doesn't have the same communication and communicability of the mass culture that we live in every day. In my opinion it remains incomprehensible but above all not enjoyable for most people. Perhaps it is only a natural cultural and temporal flywheel that requires its time to turn, waiting for this art culture to bring itself to a wider public. This premise is very embarrassing when it concerns working outside of an environment intended for work. Only a direct experience of a contemporary work allows one to enjoy it somehow, but this means that contemporary art should come to the people in order for them to personally enjoy it. For art, the usual mediatic communication doesn't work. No explanation is useful. Like in jazz, theater, or lyric music, the amazement and personal feelings of "live" experience is the only key to access something fundamentally unsuitable for communication through radio, television, or newspapers. Each media recounts itself fundamentally; art does the same when it stays in its specialized context, nomatter what excellent journalism, television, or radio is utilized in order to talk about art. If contemporary art, out of its protective context, doesn't want to risk becoming the artistic defecation that some imprudently leave across the territory, it must have its own elusive, mimetic-spectacular characteristics, precisely in order to tell itself.

	Giacinto Di Pietrantonio Born to Lettomanoppello in 1954 has stayed manager of the Flash Art Italy (and in partnership Editor of Flash Art International) and teach History of the art to the Academy of Brera in Milan. Critical of art has taken care varied editions of the reviews annual to the Castle of Volpaia (Siena) and Fuori Uso to Pescara. He is the administrator and coordinator of the plan of art Italian Territory. If there is one thing art can teach us, it is to believe in our dreams; not in the Freudian or Surrealist sense, but rather in giving body to one's desires, one's utopias. In fact, we always speak of rules and laws that set limits upon the intervention of art in reality, a reality that is built more and more by engineers or architects, who always find a place for laws but never for art. Perhaps this initial consideration is a little rhetoric, but I believe in the end that it's true. We always complain of the lack of museums in Italy, of the absence of spaces for contemporary art, but I don't believe in this victimised attitude. I believe Italy is a beautiful country, and as far as art's concerned it's great. I don't speak about contemporary art, but of art in general, just as I don't speak about structures and I don't speak about institutions, but I speak about artists and work. The truth is that the strength and presence of a structured system does not always coincide with or affect the quality of the work of art. Departing from these considerations and appraising my possibilities, as well as the deficiencies of structure and of my dreams, considering that I live in this very beautiful country-I am an Italian citizen, I pay taxes-I thought: the territory of Italy is the only country in the world to have a figurative form: a boot! It's destiny is therefore intrinsically tied to art. I then wanted to make my own museum and call it "Territorio Italiano" ("Italian Territory"). Today you can also visit it on the Internet: Undo.net/ Global Vision. This plan began at the beginning of the 90s. Marco Cingolani and Massimo Kaufmann, artists and friends, arrived at a certain point; they were doing a magazine called Documentario, and they offered to finance a show. I thought that this was the moment to realise my dreams and in turn the dreams of the artists. I asked about forty artists from all the parts of the world to choose a place in Italy and propose a project for this place. My intention was to realise them all. The only condition that I set for the artists was that this place could not be a museum or art space. I departed from the idea that Italy is a territory of artistic history, that its entire landscape has been constructed by art. Each Italian city, big or small, is a city of art; even a small town, in its historical center, in its ancient districts, has been constructed in imitation or difference, and built a unity of architecture and landscape. Importantly, the museum was born more or less in the same period of the industrial revolution, to satisfy the demands of the new capitalistic middle class, but it has now perhaps entered a crisis and must recover a different relationship with reality. In fact, if we are in a post-industrial phase and in a post-capitalist economy, we will also have to consider the possibility of a post-museal period, such as was evidenced in Jan Hoet's show "Chambres d'amis". In any case, the first thing I would like to say is that I have enjoyed working on "Territorio Italiano" very much; I believe that when you do something it is very important that you enjoy it, as Marx would have spoken about unalienated labour. In fact, I have begun to visit all the places that the artists have chosen along with a photographer, Laura Muraglia, in order to "take visual and existential possession of the territory", and to acquire the materials for making the shows and catalogues. It is a project that also has a subtitle: "the Eternity Project for contemporary art", because they are permanent works and, not having institutional backing in a moment of economic crisis, I knew how difficult it would be to realise all the projects and I certainly didn't want to have them exist only for brief times. I then began the "Cantiere Italia" ("Site Italy") project, following the show, that consists of the realisation of the same projects. I have at this point realised eight. They have all been realised with the help of friends and private donations, without public assistance. In this attempt to build single projects I have had a lot help. The first project was the work of Shozo Shimamoto, an artist who formed part of the Gutai group. Shimamoto made a banner project for the Salvicci tower of St. Gimignano that was realised in September of '93 thanks to the contribution of the gallery Continua (which is comprised of a group of guys, Maurizio, Lorenzo, and Mario, who really love art and sponsored the whole operation). Obviously the banners are not displayed permanently but are put up and taken away according to the occasion; a function shared by all banners. Shimamoto wanted to repeat the operation in Japan as well, in Osaka on New Year's Eve 1993/94, like a ritual of hope. He wrote to me, saying that the towers were similar to those of St. Gimignano, but to me they seemed nearer an Aldo Rosso building (and this shows how the Japanese interpret and process the West). The second plan was realised by Irwin, a Slovenian collaborative. They make part of a symbolic State in their invention which is called "Neue Sloveniske Kunst" ("New Slovenian Art"). Inside of this State they have created departments that any real State has, with embassies, consulates, etc. Their project was to create a consulate in a Florence hotel-called (note the coincidence) "Ambassadors"-on Via Alamanni right next to the Maria Saint Novella train station. Here we had the support of the hotel owner and collector Maria Silvia Papais (who became their Consul). Every so often inside this consulate things would happen. The first evening, Irwin released the passports of this new State. Naturally, the political references are clear, keeping in mind that they founded this state when the former Yugoslavia was still "together". They tried to simulate a symbolic state such as the communist state retained to hold together the various regions of ex-Yugoslavia. The passports have all the characteristics of real ones, they were also printed at the Slovenian State mint. Obviously, they are not inscribed "State of Slovenia", but "Neue Sloveniske Kunst". Participating at the "Neue Sloveniske Kunst" are graphic design groups (Neue Collectivism), musicians (Laibach), groups that are concerned with video and cinema (like Retrovision), and theatre (Noordung). The third project was realised in Bologna by Alberto Garutti. The plans from their ideation to their realisation evolved: the original design was to be inlayed on the hotel room floor where Garutti always stayed when he was in Bologna to teach. He later thought to make the project for the ceiling, but in the end he opted for a work of crystal on the wall, painted behind with yellow phosphorescent varnish. The people who stay in that room are not told under any circumstances that it is an artwork, so they think it's some kind of mirror, but when they extinguish the light, a square of light around two meters by two meters appears, a kind of vision opens in the wall, like a passage to the infinity. You can imagine the amazement of whoever is in front of this kind of miracle of light. Dimitri Kozaris planned instead a project for RAI-TV, a series of brief videos called "Fast Food", to be inserted within the transmission Fuori orario ("Outside Schedule"). Kozaris' video was broadcast in 1994. This is obviously not a permanent work either, except for within RAI-TV's files. John Armleder wanted make a sculpture on the Po river at Piacenza, which was realised with the help of Baldini from the gallery Placentia and Tullio Leggeri. The most difficult thing about this work was to acquire the permission, because the Po is considered an Environmental Resource and, like the Uffizi, it has a superintendent called Magistrate of the Waters who hardly ever gives permissions for interventions on the Po basin, but thanks to an article about Territorio Italiano in the magazine L'Espresso he was convinced and gave all permissions. Armleder foresaw that his sculpture would become transformed by the water which submerges it completely during the floods and moves it each time. Subsequently we did a project by Carla Accardi in the Casa Ratti in Santa Maria Novella, a medieval district of the Commune of Radda in Chianti, in province of Sienna. They are two ceramic star-shaped sculptures, a kind of eight-pointed cross. Spalletti made a project for Bergamo: an entirely blue room which you entered to find a very particular, intense atmosphere. At a certain point, however, despite the fact that we had found a proper location and it was made available to us by the authorities, Spalletti reconsidered the project and insisted on making it in the residence of Cappelle sul Tavo in the province of Pescara, in the room that he lived as a child. Finally, Alfredo Pirri made a bridge project come true in Cosenza in honour of the Bandiera brothers who were killed as they attempted to bring the people there into the struggle for national unification. The bridge had to have the colours of the (underground movement) Carboneria (black, turquoise, and red, respectively symbols of faith, hope and charity), but this plan was not realised. In the meantime, Alfredo thought of another project that could enter into the spirit of "Territorio Italiano". His new project consists of text upon the building in which he has his studio. It treats an ex-industrial building in Rome, the national center of ARCI NOVA (a cultural association), and the international offices of ARCI, the offices of Nero non Solo ("Not Only Black"), the magazine Ora d'Aria ("Air Time"), the Center for initial reception of ex-prisoners, a school of dance, and a theatre upon whose fa‡ade he was asked to do a work. He thought of the illuminating text, "Malafronte", which is the old name of a furniture industry that once occupied the place, but at the same time the text changes itself into the signature of Malatesta (the Neapolitan anarchist). The writing is ten and a half meters long and eighty centimetres tall, and it alternates between the bright white of Malatesta and the blue of Malafronte. Thus, those artists accepting invitations to Territorio Italiano, like Carla Accardi, To Hoc, Getulio Alviani, John Armleder, Guillaume Bijl, Alighiero Boetti, Henry Bond, Angela Bulloch, Stephen Casciani, Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Wim Delvoye, Alberto Garutti, Liam Gillick, Irwin, Dimitris Kozaris, Maurizio Mochetti, Gian Marco Montesano, Maurizio Nannucci, Marcel Odenbach, Luigi Ontani, Julian Opie, Anatolj Osmolowskj, Mimmo Paladino, Alfredo Pirri, Vettor Pisani, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Dimitrij Prigov, Emilio Prini, Mimmo Paladino, Bernhard Rdiger, Thomas Schtte, Shozo Shimamoto, Ettore Spalletti, Haim Steinbach, Rosemarie Trockel, Ben Vautier, Konstantin Zvezdotchotov, attempt to carry art outside of the artistic context, thus beyond of the ready-made, because today the problem is: in bringing Duchamp's urinal back into the real world, does it remain a work of art? Therefore, "Territorio Italiano" is my dream of bringing art back into life as real Italian characteristics, not only of the past, but also the present, such as Futurism sustained, and like Raphael Rubinstein wrote in Art in America: "A true Italian project moving between art, aesthetics, tourism, and life."

	Piero Gilardi Born in Turin in 1942, artist and theoretical, has exposed in numerous galleries and museums of all the world. Attentive to the relationship between art and life has worked in atelier of "free expression" in psychiatric hospitals, in political movements and has organized experiences of collective creativeness in marginal cultures in Nicaragua, in Kenia or in the reserves Irochesi. Since 1985 are concerned with advanced technologies and participate to numerous groups of job. Between the recent plans remember Ixiana, Inverosimile, Survival. I want to begin with the presentation of a video demonstration of the interactive installation "Survival", then go through some reflections on the artistic experiments that have been presented in the course of this conference and have given rise to some strong emotions for me. "Survival" is an installation that could be presented in any open public space, for instance, in a subway station; in fact, I have already assembled it once in a non-artistic context-the electronics fair in Bologna-in which an ordinary urban audience easily participated. The installation takes the form of an archetypal space with a sensory floor and a screen for virtual, computer-graphical images. The participants enter and operate in this space in a kind of "game" of urban planning; they arrange the stalagmites in a certain way upon the floor of this simulated spelaeologic cave, which composes the structure of a metropolis upon the screen. From their beginnings in the digital space of the screen, each stalagmite is a "edifice-guide" that induces the birth of other buildings and of urban infrastructures around itself; these structures evolve until they arrive at a certain urbanistic equilibrium. You could say that this "game" could serve the inhabitants of a metropolis or district to reproject their own habitat, sifting through a multiplicity of possible solutions. The software which develops the growth and arrangement of the urban structures is based upon a particular type of genetic algorithm, that of the cellular automaton; it deals with a system that adapts and numerizes the evolutionary parameters of the Darwinian theory, applied to urbanistic elements and, according to the input furnished by the participants, a large quantity of possible conformations develop. In a certain sense, this job is also a reponse to the current crisis of architecture in that it prefigures a method of self-projecting the metropolis on the part of its citizens. "Survival" might have the appearance of a humourous metaphor, but its artistic and conceptual significance reconnects two fundamental ideas of art of the Sixties onwards: the process and interactivity of the work. These ideas are floating back to us today. A short while ago, while viewing the images of the experiences of the Piombinesi group, Arienti, and the Stalker group, I asked myself if Germano Celant's approval of the Arte Povera artists, who created these ideas, did not clip their potentiality and their development for two decades. Process and participation were strong implications in the work of not only the Arte Povera artists, but of all the artistic movements that exploded a little bit everywhere in the Western world at the end of the Sixties with the intent of carrying art into life. Today, after twenty years, "Poverismo" has been imposed like a chilled academy, and the signs of that tendency resurface to research a symbiotic relationship between art and life. The attention with which we have followed the presentations of Scythes, Arienti, Cavenago, etc. in today's meeting seems to me to testify to the need to reground ourselves after the aesthetical inflation of the Eighties, a need to respond to the tensions and human needs which have been failed by signs, symbols, and icons. This does not only mean the need for an ecology of the mind, motivated by the nausea from the multiplication of objects that besieges us, but also the presentiment of a new possibility of life, and therefore of a way to make art. The opening of a new, revolutionary, epistemologic horizon is changing our individual and collective life. If, for instance, we analyze the work of the Piombinesi group, we find a correspondence with the scientific theories of Francisco Varela that in substance explains that we no loger exist in an objective world, but that with our actions we continually remodel the world of our mind. This concept puts what is real and what is virtual on the same level, and thereby gives us the inclination to manipulate not forms but their generative codes, such as we do with the computer. Thus, it appears clear that if we are able to continually remodel our lives, then our existence could be a continuous and uninterupted "work of art". At this point, we have no more need for the symbolic dimension which has saturated us with its pervasive mediatic icons: we can go back to the sources of life, free our imaginations and play in relations, even as the net of relationships is becoming transparent, thanks to the expansion of cyberspace. In my work I propose technological virtuality precisely because it offers a space for the potentialities of being, and therefore frees symbols and icons of their traditional normative linguistic function. I believe that we have all been warned about the implicit risks in the virtualization of the world-those connected to the manipulation of information, for instance-but I think that through cyberspace-intended in the broadest sense-a dimension of the collective creative intelligence that gives form to our need to live "artistically" is being born, to express our singularity in an open way, without the "difference" and "possession" that prevents connection with others. This means to me that we can interface with immaterial technologies, and live the cultural and anthropological mutations which they induce in us, on the condition that we are aware of the new indeterministic epistemological dimensions and assume an active position against the strategies of control and egoistic use of the virtual by economic and political powers.