one thing southern italians are famous for is their improvisation skills. there are no job opportunities for youngsters and if you dont want to work your ass in the countryside – which weirdly looks uncool these days – and you dont feel like going north to find a shitty job, you have to be creative and improvise to get to the end of the month.
that’s why the limit between legality and illegality in southern italy is more elastic…
improvisation is indeed, the only key of fame festival and legality has never been a friend. whatever you see in these nice and clean pictures on the internet is the result of really fucked up situations and hundred of crazy tricks to find the one very specific solution to make it all work each time.

sometime you get to the wall and you realize that the scaffolding you put up is not tall enough

- problem – the artist might get nervous

solution: call the guy with the cherry pickers. realize that there is no way in for such a big car, destroy the wall of the neighbours while they sleep, get in with the van

the artist start painting or, as in this case, pasting up a huge picture. it all goes back to normal

you’re on the elevator assisting him and you start hearing a lady screaming from very far away, she has to be the owner of the wall we teared down and she’s coming to kick our asses

- problem – the artist might get worried

solution: you go down fast, you study the subject really quickly and find the right words to cheer her up with the promise that you’ll put the wall up again when the work is done

the pasting goes on and it all feels good again…that’s when you realize you’re an idiot and you measured the wall wrong, the picture printed by the artist wont reach the other end of the wall and it will look like shit

- problem – the artist might start to seriously hate you

solution: you go to the printing place in town to make some more strips

it’s at the shop that you figure out that their printer sucks, and the prints are looking really bad, the toner is not making it and there are white lines everywhere. this is the point where you’ve already done too much mess, it cant get worst then this and whatever comes up, it will have to work

- problem – the artist is outside waiting for you and fighting himself not to beat you up

solution: you correct the strips with a black marker and pretend it’s all cool

only in the very end of all this tragedy, you can finally go to the blog and post pictures of another great piece of art:

this is the very first picture pasted by JR which was not shot by him, it was shot somewhere in russia and pasted here, it talks about a problem that, unfortunately, has no possible improvised solutions. this is part of Jr new big scale project called “unframed”, more infos here

thanks a lot to federico who passed by occasionally on a saturday morning and ended up destroying the wall with us, antonio for his support with the cherry picker at the last second, gregorio and peppo for helping building the wall again and Jr for being an authentic gentleman and keeping a smile on his face from the beginning to the end of all this mess.