Senses are active and interactive in every moment of life, even in dreams.

One sense activates the others.

And the senses trigger memories and emotions or generate the future.

They can guide our moods.

And they can be – in us – formidable allies in interpreting

that dynamic complex that we call reality.

URBAN, an artistic project linked to multi-sensoriality, an event held in Milan in 2015, in collaboration with

Creasens.

An active artistic experience: sight, hearing, smell (and indirectly, taste) and touch.

A sensory bombing that triggers an emotional, imaginative, synaesthetic reaction.

I asked each participant to write down their thoughts and feelings to continue, through the story, the sensory experimentation and highlight the effects that a stimulus of this type produces.

Writings, voice recordings, photographs, memories of this whirlwind evening, full of emotions and fun.

With me, many friends and Paolo Cerizza, the “nose” creator of the fragrances, and Francesca Guglielmetti, of Creasens.

When the senses meet, a story is born. The perfume stimulates the memory, the shapes and colors of the paintings help to focus, the sounds and the music evoke the right rhythm.

by Tania Paradiso

The notes of the city and its colors, the scents of the people and the smells of the street have merged together. It’s a fluid bombing of emotions. There are the cries of children, yellow, excited by the energy of life that blossoms; the red traffic lights that require you to stop even when you want to run away. It is the metropolis, it does not allow you to escape, it keeps you anchored to its chaotic rhythm. I smell the fragrances and the story begins to take shape.

He is walking briskly down the street: he is young, handsome, hot because he is late. That appointment in the studio, the presentation of the advertising campaign he has been working on for months, is likely to skip because he hasn’t heard the alarm.

He doesn’t have time, he doesn’t have time until he crosses her.

Across the street is a young woman: long hair, a red polka dot dress, like the traffic lights in the city. She too is sweaty and with difficulty holds everything about her together: her life, her work crumpled on those papers stuck in her purse, the shopping bags and the stroller with her little rascal inside her. He looks at her and welcomes her with her eyes. What strikes him above all is the perfume she wears, the sweet and sour scent of the city.

A horn sounds loud, the driver starts screaming and almost gets out of the car. “Move away!!” she tells him. Only then does the boy realize that he has stepped over the sidewalk and stepped out of the rhythm of the city. He goes back to his place and remembers he’s late. Then he turns to find her, but she is already far away, wrapped in hot and suffocating asphalt.

The audio file is finished. I take my eyes away from the painting, smell the three fragrances again and leave this synaesthetic journey that has taken me far away. When the senses meet, a story is born. The perfume stimulates the memory, the shapes and colors of the paintings help to focus, the sounds and the music evoke the right rhythm.

This is Urban: a synaesthetic encounter of metropolitan emotions. Hard, concrete, sometimes difficult and lonely but real and everyday.

The art of relationship, better known as Arte relazionale,

is a form of contemporary art that develops around the mid-nineties and provides for the participation of the public user in the construction or definition of the work they enjoy. At the center gravitates the vision of people who want to explore the potential of creativity.

Unlike other artists of this current who reduce or cancel the aesthetic value of the work or installation, I have not abandoned the aesthetic value of the production and I have continued to strive to activate the user’s creativity, transforming the art object in a place of dialogue, confrontation and, indeed, of relationship in which the final work favors the process, the discovery of the other, the encounter.