Arte Ambientale, Urban Space, and Participatory Art by Martina Tanga

Author:Martina Tanga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

4

Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente

Ugo La Pietra’s and Franco Summa’s Urban Interventions

In a photograph from Ugo La Pietra’s archive, republished in the book Abitare la città in 2011, the artist sits on a bench with two colleagues—Livio Marzot and Giuseppe Spagnulo—observing the construction of high-rise residential buildings in Milan’s periphery [Figure 4.1]. Directly in front of them lies a narrow patch of grass with a few newly planted trees. This seems to be the only green space—and social space—left in this vicinity. Beyond are soaring residential towers in various states of construction. A lattice of scaffolding and massive cranes dominates the horizon. Nothing about this part of the image is at human scale, nor do we see any people; only endless rows of apartment towers. This view exemplifies the state of Milan’s peripheries during the 1970s. La Pietra witnessed the outsized growth of his hometown as its residential outskirts expanded like an oozing dark oil stain. Throughout the peripheries of Italy’s major cities like Rome, Turin, and Naples, grids of high-rises emerged without logical connection to how people lived and what they needed to build a community. These areas served one purpose: shelter for those who could not afford to live in ballooning urban centers.

For artists like La Pietra, the city needed to be won back from capitalist and commoditizing forces, and reappropriation became an aesthetic strategy. He worked with local inhabitants or alone to reformulate and recast urban and suburban spaces. Curator Enrico Crispolti highlighted this phenomenon in the section “Individual Urban Reappropriation” at the 1976 Venice Biennale exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, calling attention to the work of La Pietra and Franco Summa as particularly representative of this trend. Their activity ranged from photographic observation to transformative interventions, such as painting marks on a building and mounting performance activities in the streets. Critically, they situated all these aesthetic projects within the fabric of the city, taking up space both physically and figuratively. La Pietra and Summa repurposed the city as both a site of protest and a space of illumination, ultimately hoping to make inhabitants aware of their surroundings and the latent discourses of power in their communities.

This chapter takes La Pietra’s and Summa’s art practices as case studies, elaborating on aesthetic interventions in the urban context already addressed in Crispolti’s exhibitions, specifically Volterra ’73 and Ambiente come Sociale, and in the work of sculptors such as Somaini and Staccioli. This section, however, will focus on La Pietra’s and Summa’s architectural, painterly, photographic, and conceptual strategies of reappropriating urban space. Delving into these artists’ oeuvre during these years, I examine the intersection of their aesthetic activity and sociopolitical movements concerned with taking back the urban environment.

Figure 4.1 Ugo La Pietra, Periferia di Milano, durante la ricerca sui “Gradi di Libertà,” c. 1970, documentary photograph.

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