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On Saturday 21 April, during the inauguration of Art Can Change The World, the exhibition organised by Florence Biennale in collaboration with Street Levels Gallery, the Municipality of Florence and Firenze Fiera on the occasion of the 82nd Handicrafts Trade Fair, there was the presentation of VITA d'ARTISTA, the installation created by Tuscan street artist Zed1.

Zed1 painted the four faces of a parallelepiped, 3m wide and 2.5m high, representing four fundamental steps in the life of an urban artist. The entire structure was covered with the Second Skin technique and ‘bombarded’ with writings and drawings by various local street-artists and writers.

AGONY AND FREEDOM is the title of the façade on which Zed1 has depicted an artist placed in the pillory of his paintbrush. In his hand he holds a dove that is a symbol of peace and freedom. This painting draws attention to the profession of the artist, commonly seen as a do-nothing or a person who does not need to work. Too often the creative professions are undervalued, discriminated against, or not paid adequately; this continually places the artist in a situation of agony where he or she remains a slave to his or her work/passion, but always with the hope of maintaining a free spirit in his or her heart.

A JOURNEY TO MEET NEW STYLES, one of the great advantages of being an urban artist, is that very often one is inclined to travel and explore new lands where one can meet other artists, new styles, cues and inspirations that will influence one's own artistic production. While Zed1 was painting the parallelepiped, Jamesboy, another urban artist of Peruvian origin, came to visit him. Zed1 asked him what was a typical animal of Peru and received the answer ‘the Lama’. So Zed1 drew a llama next to a pigeon, a typical animal that can be seen in Italian squares, thus bringing together two animals that, if they did not travel, would never meet.

BEHIND EVERY BOMBING THERE IS AN ARTIST WHO IS BOMBING is perhaps the most significant of the four paintings created. Bombing is the practice of spreading one's tag on walls as much as possible, in the world of graffiti writing a bombed wall is when one creates a colourful texture, dense with different tags. Behind the dense bombing on the Second Skin, we find an ‘artist’ character, with a mermaid's tail replaced by a dirty paintbrush and a bucket of paint in hand; hanging like a ripe flower on the tree but ready to blossom. Normally, a young boy approaching the spray-painting tool always starts with simple writing or tags. It is considered the ABC among those taking their first steps into the world of graffiti writing first and street art later. Even Zed1 started by repeatedly writing his name on walls and trains before becoming the urban artist we know today. All too often this common origin is forgotten, tending to differentiate between ‘good street art’ and ‘bad street art’ without taking into account that graffiti and urban art are two sides of the same coin and that, without graffiti writing to pave the way, there would be no street art today.

PRESERVING LOVE is the latest intervention, perhaps the most romantic, by Zed1. Art has always been one of the best ways to tell the story of love, but even those who make art need to always preserve love for art itself, despite all the difficulties it brings. A hand holding and protecting a female character with ‘pointy faces’ which, in Zed1's imagination, represent hostile characters, in stark contrast to the soft, circular shapes of the artist's puppets. This is Zed1's tribute to love and this controversial relationship of giving and receiving.

This intervention, entirely sprayed as in the best graffiti tradition, aims to be a bridge of connection and dialogue between street art and the more institutional exhibition space, trying to bring to light some of the controversies that have always been present within the urban art world.