MP5 is an Italian artist. She trained in Bologna, where she studied scenography, and in London at the Wimbledon School of Art, where she dealt with stop-motion animation. Subsequently, she moved to France where she start experimenting in the field of installations and street art, creating wall paintings in different European countries. At the same time, she published numerous comics and illustrations all over the world. MP5 is a transversal artist for whom art is a powerful mean to convey political and social messages and it is also for this reason that her works are always very neat, clear and defined. In these artworks the experience incessantly crosses the artistic practice, giving life to strong impact images.
In Italy, she is well known also thanks to the illustrations created for “Non Una di Meno” (a feminist movement inspired by the Mexican and Argentine NiUnaMenos movement that fights against gender-based violence).
In recent years (from 2013) he has worked in collaboration with Gucci on a series of wall paintings at the Gucci Garden in Florence and an art wall in Milan (Via Moscova), in support of the “Chime for Change” project.
For the wall painting at the Gucci Garden he investigated the various actors and aspects of sexuality, including (for the first time ever) disability, which in many contexts still represents a taboo.
Chime for Change is a global social promotion campaign founded by Gucci in 2013 with the aim of discussing and supporting the issue of gender equality (with several projects in 89 countries around the world). The Chime for Change campaign invites the global community to support gender equality and self-expression under the slogan “to gather together”. Each figure represented is flanked by another whose gender – or other labels – cannot be identified.
In the artworks of MP5, the architectural element blends into a neat drawing with clear contours that recalls the style of the comic. The alternation of the – always present – white and black in her wall paintings and illustrations, often contrasts with a single colour characterised by bright tones. The choice of the latter or its absence immediately recalls the context to which the subject refers, capturing the observer between spirals of thick and raw lines, connected bodies, and monochromes that submerge the viewer.
One Army is a wall painting created for the town Civitacampomarano (CB) in the framework of the Urban Art festival which aims to repaint the walls of old and very small villages in order to reduce the growing depopulation and celebrate those who work every day to keep these places alive.
“Save our souls” is a wall painting commissioned by the city of Terni (April 2018). It represents a reflection on the condition of Italy, depicted as a shipwreck of civilization, culture and solidarity. Even in Italy, a democratic country with a long intellectual and cultural tradition, the minorities and the realities that work in defence of rights and cultural innovation and environmental policies are systematically marginalized. Short-sighted policies condemn them to death, producing an increasingly anaesthetized and self-referential human community.
Matriarchy was created for the industrial area of Perugia (October 2017). It is conceived as a reflection on the power of connection between groups of women united by a mysterious force deriving from their ability to communicate and listen. MP5 says: “I imagined it as a peaceful engine of a necessary change”.
Cagne Sciolte is a trans queer feminist collective placed in a former night club that was closed for prostitution in 2013. some of the collective’s main activities are the establishment of an anti-violence desk, foreign languages courses and pole dance lessons (pics Ilaria Magliocchetti Lombi).
