Frogmen: the history of Florentine street art re-written


On Tuesday, October 18th, at the Church of San Jacopo in Campo Corbolini, at 6PM, Isabel Carrasco will present her bookFrogmen. Primi belati de street art a Firenze”.

The presentation will be the occasion to discuss about the Street Art in Florence, and the talented artists who animated the Florentine artistic scenario, in particular Aroldo Marinai.

During September and November 1979, Aroldo Marinai (Florence, 1941) was stenciling the silhouette of a diver around the center of Florence. With that action, Marinai was likely the first to bring to his city a notion of the street art culture he had been exposed to during his recent stay in New York. In addition, he decided to take the action to a further level by documenting the process with photographs, a sort of written diary, and an exhibition that included a performance. The whole project was published as a short-run booklet entitled: Frogmen: Un segno sui muri come per caso in 1980. The book has been recently re-published as Frogmen. Primi belati de street art a Firenze, 2021.

The book re-edition is put Frogmen in the context of Florentine and European street interventions revealing the key role of Italy in the time-line of independent practices in public space. This conference aims to analyze the project Frogmen as well as to broadly discuss the particularities of Florentine street art. This project is the result of two Marist College – Istituto Lorenzo de´ Medici summer-research scholarships (2018 and 2019). And of a Fall 2020 semester collaboration with LdM Gallery.

ISABEL CARRASCO

Mª Isabel Carrasco holds a PhD in Philosophy by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She works as a Program Director for Marist College Spain and as a Professor in Boston University Madrid program. Her research activity touches upon the relationship between image and writing in contemporary art, focusing on mural writing (graffiti), calligraphy, and independent visual art interacting in public space.

Some of her last publications are: Frogmen. Primi Belati di Street art a Firenze (co-authored book). Florence, 2021. “Love before Tinder. Popular Graffiti in Torrenueva (Ciudad Real)” (article), Lisbon 2022, “El juego entre la escritura y la imagen. Graffiti en los años 70 en Nueva York” (book chapter), Madrid, 2022. Isabel also practices classical and modern calligraphy since 2012.