The Bologna-based public art project CHEAP is wont to use the city, and its walls, as a place of struggle and conversation, to deliver messages that break the tranquility of passersby’s visual overview. In the days of election campaigning and slogans also shouted through posters pasted on the walls, CHEAP has launched ON FIRE, a new project that has seen the creation of more than 150 posters, with as many different artworks, created by Italian and international artists selected in the past few months from more than a thousand candidates.
The techniques used for the posters are the most diverse, and have produced very different works, united by a single theme, a single visual and symbolic element: flames. Whether it is that of a large fire or a lighter, the flame stands for CHEAP as a symbol of struggle, love, and courage in generating conflict. The flame is also seen as a metaphor for desire, or as a source of warmth to which not to give up, not just as a destructive element.
The posters thus become sources of light and sparks from which to start a thought of rebirth, which starts from the streets, from the bulletin boards of Bologna.

Photo: Margherita Caprilli