Street art in Turin. 9 itineraries to discover urban art Street art in Turin | Page 51

T WENTY YEARS OF STREET ART IN T URIN Torino Creativa Project (translation by Beatrice Coraglia) Since the late 1990s, the Municipality of Turin has been offering an heritage of experiences, projects and realisations in the field of street art, urban creativity and public art. In 1999 was, in fact, established the MurArte project, that aimed at answering to young people’s request for public spaces where they could express themselves freely through the graffiti-writing and street art techniques. In many years of activity of this project, young male and female artists have been given anonymous portions of the city territory, which they brought to new life through their work of free expression. There have been numerous positive consequences for the urban territory: you can immediately see urban aesthetics operations on a scale of kilometres, particularly in those areas of the city that are regarded as degraded and unsafe by local people. MurArte is a leading initiative that has been then adopted by various local Administration offices on a national scale. It laid the foundations for a dialogue between the institutions and the graffiti-writing world, that allowed the promotion of its professionalization over the years, and, at the same time, the public recognition of these types of expressive languages. This brought on the desire to support, accompany and organise events (from PicTurin in 2010 to TOward2030 in 2018) that have somehow formalised the 51