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Ministero della Giustizia
Ufficio di Servizio Sociale per
i Minorenni di Reggio Calabria
Comunità Ministeriale di
Reggio Calabria
E' POSSIBILE?!
E’ POSSIBILE !? (IS IT POSSIBLE !?)
Picture fairytale:
“Some time ago, strolling between an environment
self-destructive and hedonistic environment, almost
undisturbed, she strolled in all her beauty, with a rose in her hand, a princess, Hope... a hope made of illusions and concreteness, but destabilised by a somewhat baleful world.
The end’.
On Saturday, 18 March 2023, in the ‘Gianluca Canonico’ square, in the heart of the city centre of Reggio Calabria, a wall work on the theme of Legality and the Environment by the artist LBS (Bruno Salvatore Latella) x ‘Street is Culture’ was inaugurated, designed and realised together with the boys of the Ministerial Community of the Juvenile Court of Reggio Calabria.
The conceptual and allegorical line for the psychagogical path undertaken revolves around the symbolism of the term “Wall”, in which the meanings of backbiting, wickedness, prejudice and the laces of convenience are shifted, against which one clashes, powerless, with the desire for redemption. A term that has been widely debated culturally and philosophically over the centuries, just think of Voltaire, Sartre, even the artistic metaphor of Pink Floyd. A high and strong wall that acts as a barrier to tolerance, to patience, a wall that prevents entry but also exit, a wall that divides but equally connects two worlds:
the world of freedom and the world of juvenile
re-education.
A wall that becomes a window on the world and that turns into a “metamour”: it itself faces inside other walls, those that surround and suffocate the ideas and artistic expression of the young people. This window of art thus becomes a communicating portal between these worlds, intended to manifest to the entire community the intimate feelings of these young people, protagonists of the ideological and practical realisation of the work. The wall comes to represent the median focus between these two worlds, in a meaning that redeems its metaphorical negativity, tracing its very purpose in its title: “In medio stat virtus”, an Aristotelian locution intended to indicate the balance that is always imposed between two extremes.
The project was able to be implemented thanks to an agreement between the ‘Street is Culture’ Association and the Ministry of Justice, started in December 2022, which saw the collaboration of the artist together with a group of young people from the Ministerial Community, through an educational project with a dual pedagogical value. On the one hand, importance was given to the ideational, narrative and symbolic value of the work, and on the other, the educational value linked to cooperation. In particular, the choice of the place where the work is to be installed is linked to the primary content of the image, which has Gianluca Canonico himself as a relevant figure.
The day chosen for the official presentation of the work to the city of Reggio Calabria was chosen in agreement with the ‘Libera’ Association, to anticipate the annual event organised by the same in memory of the victims of the Mafia.
“If the youth denies her consent,
even the all-powerful and mysterious mafia
will vanish like a nightmare.”
- Paolo Borsellino -
© 2024 by LBS ARTIST
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