Call for Application

B.ART – Art in Barriera was the international call for public art aimed at increasing urban quality and environmental attractiveness through the creation of widespread artistic interventions on the Barriera di Milano neighborhood in Turin.

The B.ART call, promoted by the City of Turin, the Urban Barriera Committee and convened by the Contrada Torino Foundation, was open to artists, graphic artists, designers, and architects, with the task of designing a concept and implementing it on 13 blind facades of public and private buildings in the Barriera di Milano area.

The call for proposals, which follows in the wake of the many previous positive public art experiences experimented in Turin, introduces some highly innovative aspects: the purpose was to select a single concept presented by a single subject (individual or collective) to be realized on the 13 blind facades, unraveling on the territory as a story and defining, for the first time, a unified and evocative image that can be declined on objects of common use; moreover, it is not an isolated intervention, but is an integral part of the urban regeneration actions planned by the Urban Barriera di Milano program, which include a series of regeneration interventions on the public spaces of the neighborhood.

The winning project:

Habitat, conceived by Apulian street artist Millo, born in 1979, is the project that transformed 13 blind facades in Barriera di Milano into as many works of public art.
Thirteen striking black-and-white images linked by a single thread based on the relationship between humans and the urban fabric: in each of the works, a character perpetually out of scale with respect to the context in which he finds himself performs different actions by interacting with buildings, objects, animals and people.

The work of the jury took place throughout the day on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, and consisted of two stages.
In the first one, the Jury of Experts, chaired by Marianna Vecellio, curator of the Rivoli Castle and member of the Commission for Public Art of the City of Turin, selected the 4 best proposals among the 85 received. In a second phase these were presented, for the choice of the winning project, to the Territory Jury, composed of associations, schools, neighborhood residents, owners of the 13 walls put out to tender, District 6 and chaired by Luca Cianfriglia, director of the Urban Committee.

The work of the jury took place throughout the day on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, and consisted of two phases. In the first, the Jury of Experts, chaired by Marianna Vecellio, curator of the Castello di Rivoli and member of the Commission for Public Art of the City of Turin, selected the 4 best proposals from the 85 received. In a second phase these were presented, for the choice of the winning project, to the Territory Jury, composed of associations, schools, neighborhood residents, owners of the 13 walls put out to tender, District 6 and chaired by Luca Cianfriglia, director of the Urban Committee.

“Drawing on the walls of the facades to create a habitat that can allow each viewer to feel part of that world. The viewer ‘inhabits’ a series of images in which the main subject of the works, perpetually out of scale within the surrounding environment, attempts to establish different relationships with it. Being out of scale is in fact a metaphor for our habitat and how places we inhabit over the years have been transformed and are now, paradoxically, no longer our size. The ultimate goal is the hope that, having surpassed the limits of mere beautification intervention, the spectrum of human-spectrum can find its own space for reflection and can give birth to nine possibilities.”

Millo was born in Mesagne BR, in 1979.
After his studies in Architecture he carries on a personal aesthetic research in the field of painting, focusing on the relationship between space and the individual moving from the micro to the macro scale. He receives several prizes and awards nationally including the Celeste Prize and participates in numerous Italian street art events. Rome hosts two of his solo exhibitions “In the air there is an invisible world” in 2011 and “Missing” in 2012.
Meanwhile, his works are exhibited in Milan, Bologna, Florence, Paris, Luxembourg and London, a city that hosts him with a solo exhibition entitled “Clumsy.”