11.
The FIAT sign is a self-congratulatory trophy.
Occupy the motorless FIAT plant in Via Emilia Levante against the red-coloured backdrop of Bologna’s walls became what Pea Brain and Cane Cotto did for a living. By 1986 they’d had enough of central and municipal government obsessive rules about the décor of city walls.
It’s simply a matter of what you mean by décor: is it something you do or an act of contemplation?
True, a wall is the offspring of walls and, if the latter are demolished, the wall is motherless, defenceless. So it’s ready to get married: it’s time to wipe the portraits dry.
Calling them graffitists is an over-simplification, like thinking that a hamburger is shorthand for a steer. Pea Brain and Cane Cotto are just seditious topographers.
Drawing ducklings and dogs shifts peripheries towards the centre and peripheries inside themselves.
The mission is “the result of the effort of all the walls they’ve known so that these become hostile to docile maps that want them to be immutable”, as Farinelli succinctly puts it in La crisi della ragione cartografica (‘The crisis of cartographical reason’).