256 pages Edited by Luca Borriello & Christian Ruggiero 21 x 14,7 cm Language: English Paperback Publisher: Sapienza Universitá du Roma 2013
The founding volume of the Inopinatum Study Center, the first Italian university research centre devoted to urban creativity — street art, graffiti writing, muralism, urban design — set up by the INWARD observatory with the Department of Communication and Social Research at Sapienza University in Rome. Edited by Luca Borriello and Christian Ruggiero, it gathers essays on graffiti, street art, virtual graffiti and the relationship between creativity and urban space, with contributions from Mario Morcellini, Moira Bernardoni, Caitlin Bruce, Daniela V. de Freitas Simões, Jakob Kimvall, Fabio La Rocca, Néstor García Lázaro, Lachlan MacDowall, Thomas Northoff, Axel Philipps and Christoph Pilz, Pedro Soares Neves, Simona Stano, Angela Tinwell, Myrto Tsilimpounidi and Alison Young.
Not a picture book but a founding document: the moment the field acquired an academic apparatus of its own, in the country that had until then produced almost none. The title takes its term from the strategy of the writer who gets in and out unseen, leaving only the work — inopinatum, the unforeseen. MacDowall's "The End of Graffiti" and Stano's "Signs of Impertinence" have both been cited steadily since. The volume carries a 1689 decree of the Rector of Sapienza forbidding anyone to write or draw on the university's walls — the oldest anti-graffiti ordinance the editors could find.
