Railway stations: places or non places?
The railway stations are usually perceived as places through which people pass and don’t stop. At their best, such stations host those temples of post-modernity (or super-modernity) and consumerism, which are known as «shopping centers». In both of these two cases, they are places devoted to the transit, used by people who have to go somewhere else. According to this understanding, the anthropologist Marc Augé coined the phrase non-place, to refer to them as to places of transience, that do not hold enough significance, or history, or identity, to be regarded as places. From this point of view, the railway stations are amalgamated with, among the others, motorways, hotels, airports and supermarkets. Nevertheless, the railway stations are public places, visited everyday by hundred and hundred thousands of people: why should they be characterized only by particular functions, and not by a value, which all those people could contemplate, and not exclusively use?
Public art for a Public space
Following such kind of ideas, OIOIOI Art Gallery organizes the first, and never seen before, exhibition of contemporary art in the railway stations of Saint Petersburg: Into the public. The convulsive time of millions of passengers is in this way modified into a different perception, that is in the one of a space which can offer culture and art, beauty and thinking, in correspondence with the precious artistic and cultural life of the city as a whole.
According to the project of OIOIOI Art Gallery, site specific works of art will enhance the value of different railway stations, giving to the people the unusual possibility to look at the places of their everyday life through new eyes. These are the eyes of art, in which converge strong feelings and emotions, often forgotten by individuals who pass and don’t have any opportunity to hold a trace of memory, a fragment of interest, in the space where they move.
Open air galleries
Into the public, connecting together the various railway stations with different works of art, wants to give a positive and optimist view of life to the visitor-passengers, just in the place where everyone is often alone with his or her own thoughts, dreams, intentions and ambitions. With Into the pubic, a railway station is more than a station: it becomes an open air gallery, a place in the proper meaning of the word place.
The artists of Into the public, draw and design the new business card of Saint Petersburg, because its stations are the first face of the city that millions of visitors everyday encounter. At the same time, positing contemporary art in such places of transit, the exhibition ideally connect together different sites of Saint Petersburg, and many places in the world, as many are the countries from which people arrive, and towards which they go.
Andrea Sartori
essayist and writer