People come first

Wabi-sabi, is a Japanese concept that invites acceptance of transience and imperfection. It reminds us that that there is beauty in imperfection and that all things including us are incomplete.
I imagine that suburbs are a bit like this, like a student at school who has great potential, but isn’t quite making enough effort, perhaps because the student has other things on their mind or simply is not being pushed enough. Suburbs are a wonderful but somewhat hidden universe, difficult to fully comprehend even for those who live in them.
Within the criss cross of these geometric urban edges, in these fringe spaces beyond the confines of the city centre, there are past, present and future stories emerging. Michele – a born graffiti artist – is one those. He’s the type of artist that sees a white wall as a canvas of opportunity, like a world ready be enhanced. Although he is now a Creative Multimedia Designer, his soul is still in mural art. He collects visual stories capturing them as videos, photographs, multimedia installations and street art. 

His images are for those striving to get away from that authoritarian beauty of cityscapes, for those wanting to revive suburban spaces by adding a new aesthetic dimension.  With his artistic nobility, he breaks down typical stereotypes that can so easily weigh down on these neighbourhoods.
He was born in 1976 in a Vesuvian town but he has come into his own in Ponticelli on the outskirts of Naples. This might not be home forever, but it is where he stands tall today. It seems to offer him a taste of Berlin of the 90s, during that more affordable, more accessible and more creative era when Berlin was covered in graffiti and street art. It was one of the first European cities to act as a springboard for new forms of art and expression.
Those were the days when Berlin was a melting pot of styles and genres, where artists took a piece of wall to express themselves.
 And Michele chose his walls well, he valued everything: visibility, cleanliness, size, but also the calmness of the area. In those days if you got caught, you were in real trouble. Hence, he painted at night, he painted in the suburbs to stay away from prying eyes.
In his backpack, along with his spray cans and paints, was his desire to embellish places. Those spray cans might have been superseded by technology and artists have whole series of unthinkable new tools in their kit today but his desire has not changed, it has not faded.
There’s a never-ending range of interconnections and inspirations to draw on. A creative universe where the magic word is not globalisation, but contamination.