Cities host a multifaceted linguistic fabric composed of texts, words, and names that, from antiquity to the present day, are scattered throughout its urban environment. Monumental words engraved in stone coexist with contemporary ephemeral messages written on walls and other surfaces, generating a graphic landscape which can be understood as a place of sedimentation, an itinerary in which complex histories intertwine with the present and can be observed from different angles.

Taking inspiration from the research carried out for the MACRO Museum in Rome culminating in the exhibition ALL CAPITALS, the Swiss graphic designer Julia Born guided us in exploring the writing as a means of expression, starting from the analysis of its relationship with the instrument with which one writes, capable of influencing the type of message, its meaning, its duration, its physical impact in the context and numerous other variables.

We observed the city of Palermo conceiving it as a graphic and visual landscape multifaceted composed of texts, words, drawings and other types of messages that are layered and overlapped creating a very dense communication schedule, to create posters inspired by our visual research.

During the workshop we stopped at Chiaramonte Palace (called sterile), one of the key locations of the project GAP – Graffiti Art in Prison, which houses the seventeenth-century prisons of the Spanish Inquisition, dotted with the graphic and calligraphic testimonies of the prisoners.