One place after another, the city vanishes behind us, the heart slows down and the palms get just a little less sweaty. Suddenly we are aware of it: with each architectural framing, with each new smell and drunken chorus, a whole set of emotions is unleashed through our bodies. The city becomes something extremely physical. Or better: physiological.

The exhibition Urban Embrace: Exploring Bodies and Emotions in Bologna takes precisely this as its point of departure. It seeks, in fact, to analyze how different urban spaces influence the marginalized body and how, in turn, the marginalized body is perceived and influences the areas surrounding and containing it.

Bodies, after all, are our only point of contact between what’s inside and the roaring city around us. This permeable membrane ought therefore to be investigated and these constant interchanges make for a quite interesting exploration in the art field as weòò: after all, isn’t art, too, a point of contact between feelings and the world?

The project starts therefore from interviews carried out around the city, in order to define five of what we could call “emotional areas”, a sort of psycho-geography inspired by Guy Debord’s famous research.

In this way, Galleria Cavour and its surroundings are identified as sophisticated spaces, where taste and cleanliness reign supreme. But here feelings of discomfort, of being misplaced also arise, with the consciousness that inclusiveness is never to be found in exclusive places.On the contrary, the area of Pratello opens itself to various bodies, to dancing bodies, and so does Piazza Maggiore, with its hordes of passers-by and its strong feeling of community. Parco della Montagnola, then, seems almost to be mistreating its inhabitants: it is menacing, unsafe, almost as if violence permeates its very streets. Bodies do not feel at ease here: they cry for help. Finally, the area of Piazza Verdi and Via Zamboni is permeated by its multiculturalism, but also, surprisingly, by its conservatism: the marginalized body is present, but looked down on.

On the 2nd of May, all of these feelings reify themselves through a series of performances and artworks carried out and exhibited in the various areas, creating a true outdoor exhibition, which can be visited with a simple promenade through the city center.

The exhibition path starts precisely in Piazza Maggiore, with the reenactment of the performance Divisor (1968) by Lygia Pape, a masterpiece of performance art and of community-based work. In this sort of “human installation”, the heads of the participants seem almost detached from the rest of the body and a thick layer of white fabric covers them all as a sort of huge blanket: a cloth undermining every hierarchical and social differentiation. Safeness and feeling of community, but also the hope for art to be in some way useful in reuniting different bodies under one layer all come together here, forming the perfect point of departure for Urban Embrace.

This feeling of class equality comes crumbling down in the second step of this art promenade: Galleria Cavour will, in fact, be inhabited by the living (and at the same time almost mannequin-like) of the performers of Vanessa Beecroft’s VB26 (originally performed in 1997).

Here, the objectification of the female body, the hypocrisies inherent in the fashion and beauty world, and the idea of spectacularization all come together in a powerful reenactment carried out between some of the most prestigious and high-end window-shops of the city.

Now it’s time to reach the area of via Zamboni and Piazza Verdi. Here we observe a human fauna of various kinds: the street is traversed by countless students, who are then greeted by the neighboring bars, but under the arcades it is not difficult to find figures lying on the ground or standing in the corners, the lives that inhabit the square even when the exuberance of the university students leaves the streets and gives way to silence interrupted by the breaking of a few glass bottles in the early morning air. In this place, the exhibition focuses not only on the sense of sight: it makes the audience’s attention take a detour to auditory observation, so there will be a listened and participated reading of some poems by the Canadian poet Rupi Kaur, focusing on the body and its wounds.

Parco della Montagnola is the following stop in this urban path. Here, the danger and violence perceived by so many of the people going through the area, find a concrete and striking form in the Inflammatory Essays by Jenny Holzer: colorful prints talk about intolerable times, domination, interrogations and fighting for your life. “When you dominate someone you’re doing him a favor”, “I’ll cut the smile off your face” and “You’re so scared you want to lock up everybody” are just some of the powerful sentences printed on pink, yellow and bright green papers.

The exhibition path concludes itself, after the sun has set, in Pratello, just as the area is starting to spark up with its nightlife. Here, Tracey Emin’s work But Yea is exhibited: an irreverent work that sums up perfectly the emotional charge of the area, with its open-mindedness and lightness. Ideally, here the marginalized body feels at home, if a home ever exists.

To conclude, the exhibition Urban Embrace: Exploring Bodies and Emotions in Bologna wants not only to explore the psycho-geography of such a complex and multifaceted city as this one, but, by exhibiting works and performing reenactments, it is mostly proposing a reclaiming of the city.

No place, no street can be considered neutral. The city, in addition to having a body, produces bodies: provides the framework for the social norms of subjection, placing on the margins or at the summit of a social structure of power.

Noting that public space is a completely polarized place defined by lines of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and functional ability, the exhibition aims to find hot spots that create an interference in the normalized way of experiencing city space. In this way, it is possible to give viewers a more situated sense of space that, following emotional and desire lines, goes beyond the material landscape.

Only by understanding and reifying what different spaces bring to our minds and souls can we hope to design more inclusive buildings and cities, cities where feelings are taken into consideration as an integral and predominant part of our lives.