Break down all walls to build bridges, to affirm a culture of encounter and peace. This morning, Saturday 1st June, the students of the 3D class of the “Viale della Resistenza” lower secondary school, with their teachers Monica Giunchi, Monia Strada and Sarah Cuccia, celebrated the conclusion of the project “Talking Walls” which saw them engaged for several months in the creation of a themed mural with the aim of redeveloping a part of the city. It is one of the walls of the Hippodrome (located at the beginning of the Europa bridge) transformed into a large interactive whiteboard characterized by drawings and many small QR codes which open up paths of study to listen to and see.
The work is spread over three panels: in all of them the background is a painted wall from which a large world map, many balloons and lush vegetation emerge. In the columns three musicians play their instruments to reiterate how art, in all its manifestations, is capable of breaking and breaking down all barriers.
“This – students and teachers comment – is the underlying theme that started the work: the desire to break down all the walls in the world that have been erected to exclude peoples, to delimit borders where there are war zones or military routes migrants. If these are physical walls, there are others that cannot be seen, but which are equally dangerous barriers since they also end up excluding and creating limits. They are the many walls that are inside us and that we have represented as balloons flying high in the sky because we would like to let them go, like the wall of prejudices and stereotypes that leads us to create false beliefs about people, which makes us judge them without knowing them truly or the wall of discrimination that often excludes certain categories of people such as foreigners, disabled people, homosexuals, and all those who do not fall within the canons of a “normality” that does not exist”.
