Urban Art Annual

GENIUS LOCI: The Spirit of Place, The Temple of Time

Artown NOW is an Urban Art Annual event conceived as a public mechanism for civic imagination, transforming spectators into co-authors, turning neutral spaces into places of meaning, and bringing co-presence as a practice of existence into the city, from the self to the collective.

When an artistic gesture takes root in a place, the place transforms. It becomes sacred through creation, attention, and care, acquiring form, duration, and promise. In this way, artistic intervention functions as a ritual of founding, and each work reconfigures the relationship between space and community, turning a fragment of the city into a microsystem of meaning. Here, images assume their full role, as material formations and instruments for activating collective memory. They attract and distract, summon certain spirits and dispel others, protect the place while simultaneously exposing it. From this emerges the urban pilgrimage: a work becomes a destination, and the journey toward it becomes a practice of presence.