In recent years, street art has become embedded in popular culture, representing the good and the beautiful, as well as the bad and the disgusting of landscapes. As underlined by Cosgrove’s theories (1984; 1989), the landscape is a way of seeing and a product of a specific historical timespan and cultural baggage that expresses ideals in symbolic forms. In this sense, the landscape, represented for instance by street art, can become a vehicle of power, able to communicate political and environmental discourses. Moreover, the widespread photographic documentation and the online circulation of street artworks have provided a faster way to spread artists’ messages and reach a potentially global audience._x000D_
Within the theoretical and methodological frame of ecocritical geopolitics (dell’Agnese, 2021) and based on the visual content analysis (Rose, 2012), the research aims to investigate Italian street art focused on environmentalism. The objectives are to identify the symbols most represented and understand the discourses about the environment communicated by street artists in Italy. Through the use of smoking chimneys or flying waste, some artists communicate the threat of polluted landscapes. Others represent symbolic characters, such as popular culture figures, activists, or victims of pollution, to embody environmentalist struggles. Still, others reproduce large animals on the walls, emphasizing the importance of nature. So, all aboard for a tour of the Italian streets!

Benetti Stefania
Università del Piemonte Orientale, Dipartimento per lo Sviluppo Sostenibile e la Transizione Ecologica

 
ID Abstract: 606