The document describes the Fresco's Removal workshop, which involves removing graffiti and writings from walls and buildings and transferring them to canvas panels in order to preserve them as cultural artifacts. The workshop aims to study cultural identities and behaviors through analyzing the messages left on urban landscapes. Experts and local community members work together to identify and remove representative texts that reflect the spirit of the area. The removed graffiti then become part of the workshop collection. Cities where the project has taken place are listed at the end.

1. Fresco’s Removal
Workshop
The format intends to favour a sensible approach to the
urban communication promoting a figure of researcher
who is able to give impulse to city studies through an
interdisciplinary experience and a manual restoration
tecnique.
Focussing on available resources, the idea is to stimulate
a perceptive nomadism and its connection with the
sociological aspects of the city tribes communications.
The practice is a precious teaching about one of the most
important, and old, restoration techinque: the fresco’s
removal and relatives applications.

2. Fresco’s Removal
Fresco's Removal, is an action where graffiti and writings are removed from
walls and buildings and transfered on large canvas panels allows to keep track
of this communication for the future.
The Fresco’s Removal workshop was held in many countries with very
interesting results. The project is not interested in the uniqueness of the
single text on the wall but in the process in wich many graffitis reveles the
common comprehension of the culture of the city/area itself. Is a structured
way to studies the cultural positions and behaviours in the city, and at the
same time, a collection of informal communications that reveals the
differences between an inconscious visulization of single shots and a clear
perception of a global reality wich we identify in all the signs that form a
cultural identity.
Throught the partecipation of variuos city “fields” experts, professionists and
protagonists of the cultural city scene, public administrators and other
peoples working in communication we would obtain an objective picture
which defines an essence, a recognisable spirit, a cultural DNA of the area.

3. fresco’s Removal: is an action which ultimately results in removing texts &
graffittis from walls in urban territories and transfering them in order to keep them
as testimonies of a certain culture.
part a study & theory: photographic research of symbols and graffiti - analysis of
spontaneous communication on the territory and relative cultural preservation,
productive and linguistic analysis, with particular attention to geographic border
areas – choice of the texts to remove in collaboration with local cultural partners an
partecipants.
part b removal + conservation & practice: the chosen symbols and texts are
removed from their original surface and after posed on canvas or large panels - the
product of this removal (usually 1-2 millimeters thick) is glued to the new support for
its definitive pose. The writings and graffiti removed become property of the
participants of the workshop itself.
part c: forum (for the public call for entry)
public announcement on free press
1 asking who want to join in the workshop
2 official invitation of the authors of the graffiti to join in the case study of the city
3 forum with experts & public for to chose representative texts we need to preserve
Fresco’s Removal is a communication project which analyses the messages
characterizing our cultural landscapes both territorially and conceptually.
The city is a huge advertising space used by everyone: pubic bodies reminding
citizens their duties and limitations as well as individuals using public communication
to simbolize their thoughts often in a creative way – from mural writings to small ads
and bill-posting.

4. The study allows to map the cultural groups which are found on the territory and
analized it, both horizontally and vertically way, with particular interest for the
linguistic border areas. In the cities where the project has already begun the analysis
has revealed an ample panorama of social, cultural, political and consuming trends.
Their whole creates a single communicating body, a huge slogan made by the number
of signs which together compose the collective identifying concept. The mural
messages, connected to political inclinations or parties, cultural or musical and other
fields, deeply represent the culture in the last decades.
The covering of a sign represents the destruction of these differentiations. In this
direction the cultural analysis of the community and the analysis of the territory’s
landscape merge in a single tool: if, for the first it is a sure mean to define
identities, the same writings represents, even for the second criteria, an essential
mean to catch changes of the urban landscape. “Mural graffiti, such as other actions
made by individuals, give the urban space a strong sense of use from its inhabitants:
the writing is a spontaneous structure, like travelling stalls, kiosks, shop signs, etc.
and it delimitates the borders of the resident cultural community to legitimate there
sense of belonging.” On the contrary the territory would be anonymous to its people
and there would be a lack of views which would make everyone feel a stranger in
one’s own, home social implications included.

5. We can find many examples of spontaneous communication which begin with local
themes to then reach out to international issues such as critical consumption.
Mural communications are here considered as an analysis of social trends, or at
least of those who manifest them on walls or in other ways, to enrich our research
towards a creative DNA of the members of a community.
The thought on aesthetic criteria is still open: some find pubblicity defaces our
landscapes, others think of warning signposts put by authorities, some others of
wall writings. We can ask ourselves how many of these wall writings are part of
our living and investigate on how many people they represent and moreover to
how many people they are addressed.
We will later on think about how long it takes for ruins to become aesthetic, for
these to become places of archaelogical interest such as the graffitis of the Berlin
wall, now patrimony of all (imagining the white wall without writings can be
helpful) and essential to historical connotation.
We consider the relationship between these messages and public art as well: how
many public sculptures have been removed after military or social conflicts in the
last 50 years and how many of these represented a past which was existing in our
collective conscience? How many architectural works and buildings connotated by
previous regimes or trends have been eliminated? The writing on a wall represents
the same communication, only through a different and less demanding medium.

6. Finally we need to remember that communication, seen as a sign of future
thoughts and opinions, of individuals or groups, can help us foresee how the
territory will change according to the renovated needs of those cultural societies
living in it.
Fresco’s Removal is a theoretical and practical workshop or group experience ( 3 –
7 days) for all : the project start from the analysis of territorial communication
reaches the theme of cultural preservation, up to the more operational phases
which surely involve for the nature itself of the intervention.
The writings and graffiti removed become property of the participants to the
workshop. Our operation allowes to conserve spontaneous communication traces
otherwise eliminated. We work thanks to, networks, public administrations,
architects and others that inform us about edifices and buildings of impending
demolition - in the area - which containing messages regarding the project.
Fresco’s Removal Cities
Milan
Bologna
Genova
Rome
Barcelona
Turin
Paris
Bern
Thun
Manchester
Berlin
Biel
Solothurn
Dordrecht
Catania
Naples