A work of three-dimensional street art that invites us to reflect on the concept of environmental and cultural impoverishment

COURTYARD OF HONOR, UNIVERSITY OF MILAN - In their works, the Urbansolid duo, in collaboration with Fidenza Village - The Bicester Collection, leads to a critical rethinking of commonly used objects, providing them with a new proposition of meaning, but in this installation uses a subject foreign to our daily life: the Moai of Easter Island.

These large sculptures represent, in their synthesis, an entire civilization.

The street artists - Riccardo Cavalleri and Gabriele Castellani who form the Urbansolid duo - place a fiberglass copy of two 3-metre-high specimens in the Cortile d'Onore, performing an act of both geographical and temporal decontextualization that triggers the typical short circuit of their works.

Once immersed in contemporary urban reality, defaced like the walls or monuments of our cities, these vandalized artifacts acquire a new meaning. They become witnesses of the lack of culture that guides the hand of those who carry out the useless disfigurement.

The unprecedented metropolitan dimension generates a mirror effect: we are able to grasp environmental and civil destruction only by observing contexts far from us, not realizing the disintegration of the reality in which we live.

We are almost never able to reach a full awareness, social and individual, of our decay.

Through vandalization, the Moai, symbol of a civilization that has destroyed its ecosystem, is altered in its meanings, disfigured, dirtied and brought into line with the new urban environment that hosts it.

The work poses a simple and direct question: has the lesson been assimilated or, on a global level, are we destined to end up like the Rapa Nui?

Whether it is a warning, a mere observation of a fact or a surrender, it is left to the sensitivity of each of us.