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A project curated by Sofia Bonacchi and Giovanni Cordoni

A project combining art, sustainability, and solidarity comes out of the collaboration between Florence Biennale, FERCAM, and Street Levels Gallery.

Eco-design, upcycling and creativity at the service

FERCAM, sustainability partner of the XIV Florence Biennale, has long been engaged in a circular economy project that enhances heterogeneous competences with a common goal: to present an innovative and more responsible model for art logistics. The queen of art transport is the crate, made of high quality materials, whose life, however, often ends in a single trip before being dismantled. Hence the "REcrate" project, for the realisation of a packaging that, while maintaining the rigour and traditional classical characteristics, offers the customer an eco-friendly option realised in a circular economy perspective. Thanks to the collaboration with Echo Labs, an opportunity is also created to contribute to the development of social carpentry, which offers employment to fragile categories. Once the crate has effectively reached the end of its life, it can be donated and, through the partner network and upcycling projects, re-imagined into a piece of furniture to be given to the community and to private entities sensitive to this issue.

The project for the XIV Florence Biennale

Thanks to the collaboration between the Florence Biennale and FERCAM, it was born the idea of transforming some crates, previously used to transport artworks from important museum institutions, into actual artworks, thanks to the involvement of 5 street artists, partly selected from the artists participating in the XIV Florence Biennale (Stefano Alvino and Rinascimento Punk), and partly chosen from the artists of the Street Levels Gallery (Ache 77, Exit Enter and Kraita 317), who also offered technical and organisational support for the initiative. The street artists involved used the boxes donated by FERCAM as supports to create new artworks, created in front of the visitors of the XIV Florence Biennale.

Chiara Prisco, Head of FERCAM Fine Art, commented with enthusiasm on FERCAM's participation in the project: «our commitment to sustainability and the circular economy, together with Echo Labs, finds a perfect synergy in this collaboration with the Florence Biennale and Street Levels Gallery. It was wonderful to be able to see in real time how the artists involved were able to transform what had been the container of the work into the work itself, elevating the transport crate to a new level of artistic significance. And contributing to an initiative that combines art, sustainability and solidarity, supporting Villa Lorenzi and the local community with the works created, is a source of great pride for us».

Street Levels Gallery

Street Levels Gallery is an international urban art gallery, the first place of its kind in Florence. Born from the encounter between artists and cultural producers, the gallery proposes itself as an articulated environment capable of investigating the various levels of interaction of art - between street, public and exhibition space - interacting with the urban fabric in a reciprocal and dynamic exchange, constantly changing. With this objective in mind, the Street Levels Gallery team has generated a reality entirely dedicated to artistic experimentation, the exhibition of works, and the production of connections, human plots and shared projects. Street Levels Gallery plays that fundamental “buffer role”, taking charge of mediating and reconciling the different artistic visions with the needs of private individuals, public administrations and the community served. To date, the gallery boasts a long series of fruitful collaborations with municipalities, festivals, art exhibitions, museums, companies, associations, collectives, universities, and public and private institutions, born with the ultimate finality of differing and promoting the Urban Art movement in Italy and throughout the world.

«As a representative of Street Levels Gallery – says Sofia Bonacchi, co-curator of the project – I can only express my enthusiasm for the tangible impact this project will have on our area. This initiative not only promotes eco-design and the circular economy, but is actively committed to supporting the local youth community. By supporting realities such as Villa Lorenzi, which has long been committed to supporting troubled youth and their families, the ‘REcrate’ project stands as an exemplary union of art and solidarity. My belief in the transformative power of art as a tool for social change is enhanced by having been involved in the construction of this initiative, and I am deeply proud to be part of it».

Destinazione: solidarietà

The artworks are available for sale and the proceeds will be donated to the Villa Lorenzi Project. Villa Lorenzi is a place of listening and help founded in 1988 in Florence to offer support to young people in difficulty and their families. It contributes to the recovery of social marginalization by providing hospitality and refreshment to many young people in collaboration with local institutions, healthcare companies and associations. The Villa Lorenzi Project lives thanks to a close-knit group of professionals, collaborators and volunteers who for more than 30 years have believed in prevention and early intervention in young people with distress, with the constant attention of the Florentine Church. The work is based on the valorisation of the person with his history, his needs and his entire relational system: the welcome of the young people is also the welcome of their families. To achieve this objective, a welcoming environment was created that facilitates empathetic relationships and a methodology based on different paths for each person.

villalorenzi.it

Stefano Superbi, Director of the Associazione Progetto Villa Lorenzi, states: «Every day Villa Lorenzi is the place where children, young people and families living in situations of great hardship are welcomed. We are grateful for the sensitivity and attention shown to us, which will help us to continue our constant commitment to all of them». 
Jacopo Celona, Director of the Florence Biennale, also comments: «We are really proud of this collaboration that has brought together important companies operating in the fields of urban art and art logistics. The idea was to turn objects that had previously performed a protective function and in some cases transported important museum works into real works, preserving and preserving them. In this way we have given rise to a process of transformation and regeneration that guarantees a circularity that is not only environmentally sustainable but above all cultural. Added to this is the charitable purpose of the initiative, which increases the value of the project and its ability to impact the social fabric».

With a donation to Villa Lorenzi of at least € 1000 you will be able to buy one of the works created by the street artists for this project and pick it up at the address indicated by our organisation. Alternatively, you can decide to leave this work to the community, in which case the purchased work will be placed in a structure with free public access. 
You can also make a free donation to support the activities of Villa Lorenzi.
Below are the bank details for the donation, which please send a copy to office@florencebiennale.org

BANKING DATA

Recipient: Progetto Villa Lorenzi
Bank: Intesa San Paolo
IBAN: IT27M0306902887100000001146
In the reason of payment please specify 'Street Art for Villa Lorenzi - Purchase work' for donations over € 1000 or 'Street Art for Villa Lorenzi - Donation' for contributions of any other amount.

The artists

ACHE77

Magnetic gazes, poses sealed by mystery, micro-expressions that conceal his alter ego, iconic characters that become vehicles for different cultures, subjects that invite the soul to resist.
Ache is his nickname, 77 the number that has been chasing him all his life. Ache77, born in 1991, is a Florentine urban artist from Romania. He has always experimented, provoked, listened, and looked for dialogue with the outside world. His normographic, almost ritualistic masks are forged with the stencil technique and re-signified in the use of colour and chromatic variations, in the choice of surface, and in the mood that the image transposes. Engraving thus becomes a mantra, a meditative practice in motion, the beginning of an intimate journey that, from the studio, reaches the street. Ache77 puts itself at the service of non-verbal communication in order to attract, lose, and permeate the gaze of the spectator, making him the interpreter and regenerator of the image itself. Work and observer are two numerical objects that are distinct but identical in their result, just as the artist narrates with the arithmetic formula 1+1=1, a symbol of one of his most famous works and intimate interpretation of human relations.

STEFANO ALVINO

Born in Bergamo in 1992, Stefano Alvino has been drawn to art from a young age, studying piano and developing a passion for graffiti during adolescence. He attended the “Andrea Fantoni” School of Applied Arts, specializing in graphics. From his inclination towards murals, where he combines traditional and contemporary techniques, arises his peculiarity of applying graffiti technique to canvases: using acrylic and brush instead of spray cans, he skillfully creates a print-like effect with his cutting-edge technique. His paintings, with a vibrant street style and pop colors, have captured the attention of gallery owners and influential figures, and his subjects, cute and iconic animals, have become his trademark. "Elefante Filippo", his artwork exhibited at the XIV Florence Biennale, perfectly embodies this creative versatility. In addition to its artistic dimension, the artwork offers a personal interpretation of the theme of identity in relation to the discomfort of the modern world.

EXIT ENTER

Exit Enter's art takes on meaning, body and substance at the moment of its sharing, when the little men leave the artist's private space, go out into the street and attack, shock, greet and amuse their audience. Hanging from a balloon or reaching for a heart, in pairs or alone, flying over the city or perhaps fleeing from it. Over the years, the little men of Exit Enter, a Tuscan street artist (born in 1990), have become the signature of an artist capable of translating with a few simple strokes the declinations of human feelings, and of tackling, through an accessible and ironic language, some of the social themes of contemporary life, from mass tourism to immigration, war and consumerism. Born in the beginning as the expression of an innate and visceral urge, with time Little Men became a more structured project, with new narratives and characters. Later, in parallel to the “little man” project, Exit Enter also devoted itself to other pictorial research, such as Urban Languages, Skies and Urban Monsters, aimed at finding new possibilities of contact between the urban landscape and artistic action.

KRAITA 317

Kraita317 is an artist of Florentine adoption since 2018. Born in the Romanian town of Brasov in 1996, he grew up and trained as a self-taught artist with his own crew of writers, translating his inner world through visual language. At the age of 12, he found himself running for about 2 km on a railway line chased by the police, but his memory is that of an adrenalin-fuelled moment, of a stubborn desire to dialogue with the city. The city soon becomes his home and urban action a necessity. The abstract drawing represents the only communicative synthesis that is able to exemplify his profound introspection. Painting means investigating, researching, and digging deeper; for the artist, the conclusion of a work often corresponds to finding the answer. However, regardless of his own rational order, Kraita always chooses the street and, therefore, other people to share a piece of his humanity. Inattentive passersby, serial frequenters of suburban areas, occasional visitors, and street art hunters are the recipients of the questions and reflective input intrinsic to his work.

RINASCIMENTO PUNK

Rinascimento Punk is a versatile artist, who expresses himself through a variety of media, such as murals, posters, stickers, installations, and studio artworks created on traditional or recycled supports. His art is provocative and tends to shun all forms of complacency, a perpetual balance between intimacy and vision. Rinascimento Punk’s artistic process alternates reflective phases and restless creative actions against social abnormalities, intolerance, and emotional anesthesia. His art is independent and spontaneous, characterized by pieces that can be used in multiple contexts, from art galleries to sidewalks, walls, parks, etc. The art piece presented at the XIV Florence Biennale focuses on collective identity and equality between peoples through the invention of pictograms representing an archaic conscience common to all human beings. The concept expressed by these symbols is meant to oppose the idea of hierarchical, consumerist, and repressive societies, deceptively interconnected by social media and their ever-increasing invasive technological system.