Dilaga ovunque

Barcelona, a crew of writers enters a train depot at night to “do a piece”. Cans in their rucksacks, adrenaline pumping, senses that are heightened when they climb over the wire fence with the "Prohibit el pas" sign. And then a voice shouts: “Atureu-vos! Policia!” They all escape in a flash, but one of them is caught by the agents, who once they see her papers exclaim “a su edad!”. Vanni Santoni's novel, published by Laterza as part of the Solaris series, is a second-person dialogue between the narrator and the protagonist, a 40-year-old artist who began her career in her youth, on the street art scene in Bologna, and then moved on to the world of galleries and art fairs, from Basel to London. An inner monologue, in fact, since it is a conversation between the artist and herself, in which the protagonist traces her personal history and the history of the phenomenon of street art, about which she was asked to write a book from an outsider's point of view. A definition that hurts, however, because it highlights her failure in the world of street art. The metanarrative becomes a digression, supported by a rich photographic apparatus, on the history of graffiti, from the walls of prehistoric caves such as Lascaux to the American walls of the Bronx or Philadelphia in the 1970s, a phenomenon that exploded and spread everywhere, and that, although born in illegality, was absorbed over time by the official art channels, so much so that in the most prestigious galleries the works of the most famous artists are sold for millions of dollars, of which Banksy is the most famous example. One of the many questions raised by the book is precisely that of the demarcation between the "authorised" art of murals that "beautify" cities and appeal to the market, and the work of "vandals" on trains or on the doors of houses, which disturb and outrage the same public.

Dilaga ovunque
Vanni Santoni
Laterza Solaris, 2023