City Takes Your Bus Stop? Biancoshock Will Help You Build a New One.

“The citizens, using their artisanal skills, built a new bus-stop in the same place where the institutional one resided,” says street artist Biancoshock, “choosing the shape, the colors, the useful information and its name.”

Biancoshock. *A Via Nov (New Street).* Cvtà Street Fest. Civitacampomarano, Italy. (photos courtesy of the artist)

This is community participation at its best and another route of inquiry into public space and its relationship to city dwellers for this Italian conceptual artist.

“The old bus stop was removed many years ago because it was damaged. The transport company never replaced it,” he explains.

The space was abandoned by the municipality but not by the neighborhood – so he and another noteworthy street artist Alice Pasquini convened a Zoom meeting with area neighbors during a Covid-skewed version of this years’ CVTà Street Fest in Civitacampomarano. Pasquini is also the Artistic Director of the Festival in this Medieval Italian village that is wrestling with depopulation and the related loss of services.

The bus shelter was designed to shelter a historic bench where every day the inhabitants meet for a chat at the end of the day – a symbolic and meaningful place that helps keep the sociability alive.

Together with the shelter, the stop pole was created, which shows the institutional signage and the updated timetables of the urban routes that connect the village with the city. Together they have named the bus stop A-VIA-NOV, which in the local dialect is translated as New Street.

A great new public space for the public to enjoy and the municipality is still happily ignorant of the fact. “No transport company was notified about this action,” Biancoshock tells us.

“So for me, this intervention can be interpreted more as an activist gesture than an artwork.”