Reclaim Poetry 2024

Public art project CHEAP was founded in Bologna in 2013, as “a project, a collective, a non-objective gaze, an association: the material it has chosen to investigate is paper – until now, it has found nothing more ephemeral. She mainly works on the urban landscape, deals with contemporary languages, and is committed to finding a balance between curatorial practice and activism.”

As part of their (festival) editions, CHEAP has claimed Bologna’s public space for various urgent topics. In 2024, the collective initiated campaigns centered around poetry and reading in general.

The January campaign, Reclaim Poetry, was a collaboration with Patto per la Lettura Bologna (“reading pact Bologna”). Aiming to present reading as a collective experience, the streets were plastered with fragments of poems by various authors, translated into Italian and set in Inga Plönnig’s Magnet Standard and Magnet Headline, occasionally stretched to set poignant text blocks.

The same designs were re-used in April, this time to highlight the poetry of Patrizia Cavalli (1947–2022). In the words of CHEAP (auto-translated):

CHEAP is back on the streets of Bologna with a new series of posters dedicated to contemporary poetic words: the words of Patrizia Cavalli echo on posters around the city, a collaboration with [publisher] Einaudi and artist Chiara Civello for her “Sempre Così Tour”, sprung from the song of the same name written and composed with the poet – which touches down in Bologna next April 8 at Cinema Europa.