The Street Experience - The Exhibition

Posted on July 09 2017

As suggested by the title, The Street Experience, the exhibition organised by LoosenArt at Millepiani Space in Rome - opened from 3 to 31 July 2017 - is centred on a specific, main theme: the street itself. Explored in different ways by each artist, this element is approached with different perspectives and is able to acquire many different meanings.

In our mind, the word “street” is often and immediately associated to an urban idea: since the ancient times, actually, cities used to have streets, conceived as instruments of connection and communication: from the centre to the suburban areas, from the city to the country…
At the exhibition, the street is exactly that, embodying a significant part of the city, lived and participated by inhabitants, tourists, and pedestrians as well. Demonstrations of this idea are the artworks framing children playing, adults walking or simply staring at something we don’t know: they are all concentrated in the same, single place, in a generic outside able to collect all their miscellaneous lives, all their thoughts and emotions.

Sam Heydt "A Desirable Life"

Mariusz Bogacki "Last day of Kowloon Walled Village in Hong Kong"

Ian McNaught Davis "The Occasionally Functional Eternal Flame Of Aktau"

Patrice Godenzi "06-05-2014 18-16-04 04s 41°699-2°846"

Nevertheless, the main focus of the exhibition can’t be limited to that. In fact, highlighting a peculiar moment, and thanks to the use of the colours or – on the contrary – the black and white, the photos shot by the artists also convey other details. Sometimes they are more poetic, sometimes they tell us stories, or, other times again, they report delicate social or political themes. And, in this case, they don’t need to be explicit, they just need to show something, and the message is already there, clear as new. Thus, for example, a ruined area at the edge of the city can talk about all the social problems related to poverty, crime and abuse, but also to the inability of rethinking the city as a public space initially conceived for everyone. Or a moving image, where everything is blurred, can tells us a lot of the atmosphere going on in the street: everything is fast, everything is almost elusive, but in the end the lights, the sounds and the movement are there just for us to be seen, to be captured.

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If we can think of a street as a “non-place” (quoting the forward-looking book of Marc Augé), on the other side we must remember that it is actually a space where something happen. Maybe for a second, maybe for a more extended while, the street is “an outside region” that we encounter in our everyday life, and in a way or another we must deal with it and with its reality.