Public Art, Collective Memory: the Contested Heritage of Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Columns in Piazza Verdi

In 1972 the Mayor of Bologna Renato Zangheri installed three column-like sculptures in piazza Verdi, the heart of the University district and student life. In the idea of Zangheri, the columns—made by Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro and donated to the city by the artist—were a monument to the future of the world, expressed in the city by the University and its students.Despite the harsh confrontation between the student movement and the Municipality, in particular during the 1977 clashes, the columns will soon become an affective and symbolic landmark for the student’s militant population, who appropriated them in various ways. Acts of appropriation included using the columns as billboards for political pamphlets and manifestos, or staging temporary performances and installations around them. In 1977, the columns were even used as posts to build a tent to transform the square in a large campsite. The columns were colloquially referred to “totems,” as a symbolic object for the Dadaist cult of the Metropolitan Indians, a counter-cultural agitation group. During the 90s, concerns for the preservation of the artworks forced the municipality to remove the columns from piazza Verdi—against the will of the artist—and to relocate them first at the Galleria di Arte Moderna (GAM) in 1996, and then at the Museo di Arte Moderna Bologna (MAMBO) in 2014. Reconstructing the story of Pomodoro’s “totems” allows us to tackle several issues concerning the politics of preservation, high-lighting the non-linear processes of construction and removal of physical and cultural heritage, and the role of public art in place-making in urban environments, characterized by social conflicts. Recently, in the public debate the opportunity of transferring Pomodoro’s columns back to the University District has been reconsidered, removing them from the musealization of their current installation site, and bringing them back to the life of the city, together with their powerful symbolic and memory value.However, the University District is still perceived as dangerous for the physical integrity of the artworks, because of its problematic nightlife and the proliferation of micro-criminality. The possibility to re-locate the “totems” in the area may be facilitated by the agreement between Institutions (University, Munici-pality) and all the formal and informal players active in the area (i.e. the student’s population, the local residents) upon an integrated plan of management and care for the artworks. The methodologies experimented in the city during the first year of the Horizon 2020 project ROCK, as well as the networks established by the Univer-sity and the Municipality for the heritage-based transformation of the area, are key assets for this attempt.