Arma il tuo riscatto. Installazione artistica in anamorfosi per la stazione di Piscinola

The project focuses on the abandoned construction site of the Piscinola metro station in Naples, Line 1, which in the original plans should have been an important railway intersection. The Piscinola station serves directly Piscinola and Scampia districts, but actually it also represents the main access to Naples for people coming from the northeast regional area. The station is a fundamental place in the district of Piscinola and Scampia as it is also the link between these two. At the present time some temporary fences can barely mask the widespread degradation, channeling passenger flows through the abandoned escalators to the train platforms. This paper presents the project and the making of an art installation for the Piscinola subway station, based on a specific projection method, called anamorphosis, whose aim is a participative mass action, to involve local residents through the collaboration of their children. We strongly believe that art can be an instrument for education and social developing. The main aim of this project was to unlock the current situation, in which urban degradation generates social degradation, that eventually evolves in vandalism, causing the fear of investing in projects that could be quickly destroyed by violent actions. Instead of joining the hopeless whiners, who reduce the impossibility of an improvement to the lack of funds, we decided to make the degraded urban context a communicative and an experiential matter, transforming those spaces into meaningful places.