Starting this summer, Palermo, the Italian Capital of Culture 2018, will become the epicentre of the international art world, as it will host Manifesta 12, the European Nomadic Biennial of contemporary art.

In this context DRAGO inaugurates, through the “Cycle of Drago”, its contribution and its support to Palermo, a city that is about to become a new model for sharing and collaborating in the Mediterranean.

This cycle will last six months. Its key point is a series of events that will expand rhizomatically as the T virus over the whole territory of Palermo.

DRAGO is proud to present its latest photographic work, with a book launch and an event: The Street is Watching – Where Street Knowledge Meets Photography, at Letizia Battaglia’s International Center of Photography from June 13th to September 20th, 2018, is an anthology of the street photography movement. It’s the result of a five-year iconographic research conducted by Paulo von Vacano, Nicola Scavalli and Domitilla Sartogo.

With the occasion of the book presentation, a selection of 50 images by international masters will be showcased. The featured photographers include Mary Ellen Mark, Bruce Gilden, Letizia Battaglia, Susan Meiselas, Estevan Oriol, Anton Perich, Bruce Davidson, William Klein, Ellen von Unwerth, Martha Cooper, Nan Goldin, e giovani star come JR, Pieter Hugo, Ricky Adam, e Lady Tarin.

Through a multimedia approach, which will involve unaired heretofore video interviews, projections, and suspended images, the viewer will experience a total immersion in the streets of the world: from Sao Paulo to Los Angeles, from Beirut to London, from Sirte to Tokyo. The Street is Watching – Where Street Knowledge Meets Photography is a 450-page volume with more than 400 images and contributions from experts on street culture, such as Paulo von Vacano, Ethel Seno and Miss Rosen.

For years, Drago, is Letizia Battaglia’s publisher: with Anthology and For Pure Passion. With great satisfaction, we have celebrated her nomination in the New York Time’s list of the 11 most influential women of 2017 – further confirmation of a fact that’s becoming clearer and clearer: Palermo’s status as a laboratory and as an international cultural capital. The role of Letizia Battaglia, in this sense, is fundamental, and she carries it on, always, with courage and humanity.

The cycle will continue with the exhibition “Crossroad – The Art of the Street” at the Riso Museum from November 15th, 2018. Here Drago – after the success of the exhibition “Cross the Streets” at the Macro Museum in Rome, which was the most important exhibition in Italy and “Art from the Streets”, the largest Street Art exhibition ever made in Asia and curated by Magda Danysz – is going to develop an inside-out program that will mix the most famous Street Artists in the world and the key members of the Street Art movement of Palermo and Italy.

The leitmotiv of the cycle of events will be the connection with the territory, as a way to enhance the positive energy of the streets through music and the arts. In fact, in conjunction with “Crossroad – The Art of the Street”, an exhibition/event/book presentation, called Cross the Streets: Crash Kid – A Hip Hop Legacy, will take place in Rome to celebrate the Crash Kid myth. He is a symbol of the first generation of graffiti writers, B-boys, skaters, and one of the forerunners of an artistic avant-garde.

Palermo and Rome will therefore be linked and united – through the streets – in a Mediterranean model of cultural production and promotion, whose value spreads across the streets of the world.

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