ABRUZZO AIRPORT > PESCARA FROM THE PERIPHERY TO THE CENTER

A classic nonplace, with its typical spaces designed for specific purposes (transportation, transit, commerce, leisure), Pescara Airport is a hub of important urban connections.
Recurrently, an airport crossing winds between large areas of flow and areas of rapid transitions, of runoff. Subtle boundaries are drawn within it, between the inside and the outside, between the urban and the suburban, between the boundaries and the many other directions.

Soon, from being a simple suburban area, the airport evolves to become a marshalling area to other suburbs or diversified further urban areas.
The many multifunctional and constantly traversed zones offer insights into the contemporary city to which the airport remains connected, in a symbiotic exchange, the very one that makes it a center of relations as well as a hinge between hinterland and suburbs, generating movement and connections that serve as a backbone, for events and creative proposals.

The airport is thus configured as a meeting place, where contemporary art becomes a trait d’union, between the suburbs and the urban center, usable as it passes by in a subliminal and profound way. Events, projects, performances and actions create that experimental context for which the connection between areas is marked by action and time with a calibrated rhythm.

ART, HINGE AND BRIDGE

In non-places, art represents time, as an interstice and element of connection.
In traversing public spaces, the user immerses and observes, catches details that stimulate the connectivity of lateral thinking. The efficacy of the experience, in traversing courtyards, alleys, hangars, is expressed in the pleasure of observing and feeling at one with the surroundings, to the point of soon sharing the experience of the journey.
The connection culminates in a moment of accelerated collaborative and participatory relationships, further stimulated by the interactive, immersive and engaging art between different places, eventually connected by a single recognizable sign. The airport, as much as an urban runoff area, with contemporary art becomes a center of aggregation of thoughts and people, uniting different sensibilities, nurturing multiple vibrations.

So the airport is configured as a meeting place where art becomes a trait d’union between periphery and urban center, usable as it passes through in a subliminal and profound way. Events, projects, performances and actions create that experimental context where connection is marked by action and time, with calibrated and vibratory rhythm.

The artists and their projects represent the contemporary, acting as a hinge and a bridge, with their proposals connecting the urban periphery to the city center.

ArtBox PROJECT 2024 > I Edition

Italian and foreign artists present site-specific installations in ArtBox, annually in the Pescara Airport, with activities and projects distributed within, traceable even more between marginal spaces and large areas, which assign the place a new role, that of the production of ideas,
In 2024, in ArtBox was installed on the glass window of the airport entrance box, Skateboarding is not a Crime, a work on glass by Alessandro Gabini, in front of the boarding area.
The box features the additional installation of a 3-D constructed, inverted Net, which mentions the sea and the Trabocchi architecture positioned along the Adriatic Coast, from Pescara to Termoli. All in the semantics of the city’s signs intended for passengers who can at each landing understand that the city lives on the sea. Rounding out the project is the inclusion of the e-bike, UNICA6, with a functional contemporary design, and today’s sustainable means of transportation suitable for sports everywhere.

Adriana Martino
Curator ArtBox Project
Pescara Airport

Pescara, January 20, 2024