MAUA - Museum of Augmented Urban Art expands and lands in the villages of Aielli (L’Aquila), Diamante (Cosenza), Santa Croce di Magliano (Campobasso), Favara (Agrigento) and the cities of Florence and Cosenza. Thanks to funding from the European Union-Next Generation EU Fund and the management of the Ministry of Culture, the Special Edition of MAUA was born, integrating six new territories into the network of the diffuse museum, with the intention of redefining the relationship between art and the city, interweaving local communities, technological innovation and participatory art practices, through street art and augmented reality.
In this new phase, more than one hundred murals, created by a number of well-known street artists, have been transformed into animated digital works, which will be visible from October 11, 2025. Anyone with a smartphone or tablet will be able to frame them and see them come to life thanks to the free app Bepart - the Public Imagination Movement. Each artistic intervention thus becomes an immersive narrative device, enriched by animations, texts, images and sounds, capable of expanding and multiplying the reading levels of the physical work.
After involving cities such as Palermo, Milan, Turin, Brescia and Waterford (Ireland), the project, created to enhance urban suburbs, now extends to these towns and cities in Central and Southern Italy.
In Aielli, murals recounting the encounter between art and astronomy are reinterpreted by young digital artists thanks to augmented reality. In and around Cosenza (Rogliano and Santa Maria del Cedro), interventions that are already protagonists of urban regeneration processes become digital portals that activate new forms of participation and shared memory. Diamante, with its more than 400 murals, is transformed into an augmented urban museum where tradition and digital languages come together. In Florence, augmented reality becomes a tool for narrative rewriting of urban space. Favara becomes an augmented museum where community, art and emerging technologies meet.
In Santa Croce di Magliano, the streets animated by more than 40 murals of the Antonio Giordano Prize acquire new life thanks to the intervention of more than 30 digital artists from all over Italy.
From the first core created in Milan in 2017, the project has given birth to a collection of more than 340 augmented works, involving more than 450 artists together with students, teachers, citizens and associations. As Joris Jaccarino of Bepart, the social cooperative that conceived the MAUA project, points out, “the cities involved to date - Palermo, Milan, Turin, Waterford (Ireland), Brescia, Santa Croce di Magliano, Aielli, Diamante, Favara, Cosenza, and Florence - are not simply scenarios but agents of the narrative, lived territories that become an integral part of the artistic tale.”
Underlying each edition of MAUA is a participatory curatorial and formative approach: students, creatives, digital artists and local authorities are involved in paths ranging from photography to 2D/3D animation, from creative writing to post-production, to urban design and art curating.
Each work is thus a meeting point between local visions, skills and memories, at once a testimony of context and a shared creation. MAUA is thus configured as a decentralized cultural infrastructure, capable of generating social value, collective imagination and new ways of experiencing public art.
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| Murals become digital works animated with augmented reality: the Museum of Augmented Urban Art expands |
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