Since its early days in 1920s Mexico, Public art and muralism in particular have often been seen as topical, participatory forms of art used to convey social, cultural and political messages, which are able to circumvent official communication channels. As such these messages not only are capable of transmitting traumatic memories and collective histories across generations but also to make them visible within contemporary civic society. Public art can visualise traumatic histories and historical narratives in a process of collective memorialisation which makes them resilient beyond their contextual crises. Italy’s liberal democratic political system, its welfare state with strong devolved powers, its strategic location as a node of the ‘migration crisis’, and its international contemporary artistic scene, make it an ideal case to assess to what extent public investment in new muralism and Public art was meant to foster more socially cohesive, culturally accessible, democratic and economically sustainable urban futures. Since the early 1990s, circa 180 Italian municipalities and local authorities have actively supported over 300 public art projects and festivals, involving national and international artists. In this lecture I discuss legal and illegal examples of Italian public art, in the shape of street art and old and new murals, spread across Italy and in different cities, urban spaces and historical periods (e.g. Milan, Palermo, Turin, Trapani, Catania, Genoa) while paying particular attention to the city of Rome. I will ask how they can become vehicles for the memorialisation of public histories, of public crises, and can voice memories, such as that of the Fascist regime, the anti-fascist Resistance, and more recently the fight against the mafia or against any form of discrimination due to race or gender. Methodologically, I will draw on the notions of ‘regimes of the arts’ and of ‘historicity’ as discussed by Rancière and by Hartog; and I will apply them to the study of a brand of public art. Due to their aesthetic qualities and within their communities, street art and murals encapsulate the diverse temporalities elicited by what I call ‘the regimes of memory’, thereby fashioning multidimensional memorial recollections which at once, I argue, legitimise and question, preserve and erase our understanding and memories of the historical narratives through which we make sense of a given space and foster of process of collective healing.
Francesca Billiani is Professor of Italian at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the Fascist period, modernism, and intellectual history. She is the author of a monograph on the politics of translation in Italy (Culture nazionali e narrazioni straniere, Italia 1903-1943) and co-author of a monograph on architecture and the novel during the Fascist regime (Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime, 2019). Her latest monograph Fascist Modernism in Italy. Arts and Regimes came out with I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2021. She has edited and co-edited collection of essays on translations and censorship, the Italian Gothic and Fantastic and three special issues of scholarly journals. She is currently writing a short monograph on the geographies and histories of Public art in Italy in the 20th century and has been awarded a Leverhulme research project grant (2025-2028) to investigate contemporary Italian ‘new muralism’.
