Since November 4, the walls of Rome, Naples, Genoa, Livorno, and Bologna have filled with anti-war posters. It’s a public art intervention born from the encounter between CHEAP and EMERGENCY, a collective gesture that transforms urban space into a place of dissent and shared care. The occasion is the National Unity and Armed Forces Day, but the message goes in the opposite direction: rejecting any war rhetoric and defending Article 11 of the Constitution, the one that repudiates war.
The poster campaign is part of R1PUD1A, created to assert peace as a concrete, everyday practice. CHEAP—long committed to turning city walls into open pages for political reflection—returns with its direct language: posters, paper, glue, messages that speak to those moving through the city. “War is the most widespread form of terrorism,” “In modern wars, 9 out of 10 victims are civilians”: these are some of the statements appearing among the posters, alongside works by international artists such as Camila Rosa, DeeMo, Luchadora, Jacopo Camagni, Coco Riot, Rita Petruccioli, Joanna Gniady, Infinite, Tomo77 and many others.
The images come from distant geographies yet are united by a shared belief: no war is inevitable. In Bologna, the intervention is further enriched by a selection of photographs from EMERGENCY’s historical archive, by Francesco Cocco, Paula Bronstein, Giles Duley, Teba Sadiq, and Mattia Velati. Shots that bring war back to its physical reality: wounded bodies, destroyed cities, erased rights.
CHEAP and EMERGENCY choose to speak out precisely on the day that celebrates a military victory. They do so by overturning the meaning of that anniversary and giving it back to the community, turning it into an act of symbolic disarmament. “We have opened a reflection on the imaginaries to be built,” they state, “to sabotage war rhetoric and reclaim public space, giving voice to those who repudiate war in all its forms.”
In its first year, R1PUD1A has garnered support from over 600 municipalities, 1,000 schools, and 300 cultural spaces and festivals. A broad network that shows how peace is not an abstract concept but a political and collective choice. At a time when war invades language, images, and even the imagination, the CHEAP × EMERGENCY intervention reminds us that another way of being in the world is possible: we just have to keep writing it on the walls.
