Yuri Catania was selected to create the visual identity for the Università della Svizzera Italiana's (USI) groundbreaking communication campaign, "Play Your Future." This innovative project seamlessly blends art, technology, and education, celebrating the potential and personal growth of students.
Known for his ephemeral street art and expertise in merging physical and digital mediums, Catania brought his signature style to this campaign. His work features black-and-white photographic portraits enhanced with vibrant over-paintings, symbolizing the natural process of growth and the unique potential within each individual. The chromatic and botanical elements in his art emphasize the diversity of academic journeys, with each faculty represented by a distinct color palette.
Catania’s ability to craft a dialogue between human subjects and natural motifs reflects the spirit of USI as a fertile ground for students to thrive and blossom, personally and academically.
USI Rector, Luisa Lambertini, statement: "I am grateful to Yuri Catania for visually expressing the growth of our students as a natural, dynamic, and personal process. USI offers precisely this: an inclusive space to grow, learn, engage internationally, and cultivate talent, setting the stage for their future."
Through this collaboration, Yuri Catania continues to redefine the boundaries of contemporary art, intertwining innovation and tradition in ways that inspire.
Explore the campaign and discover more.
Play your future at USI and Join Us: https://join.usi.ch/en/play-your-future#behind
The choice of flowers serves as a metaphor for USI as fertile ground where students can grow and bloom to their full potential. Each painting, enriched with vibrant colors, reflects the distinct identity of USI’s faculties: green for Economics, blue for Communication, yellow for Informatics, red for Biomedicine, gray for Architecture, and violet for Theology. This chromatic and botanical language underscores the uniqueness of every academic and personal development journey, creating a dialogue between the subject of the image and the artist’s intervention, which symbolizes growth.
Thanks to the augmented reality software Artivive, these images come to life with videos that narrate the personal experiences of the protagonists, illustrating how USI helped launch (Play) their journeys. Additionally, another layer of the original works is revealed only in the dark, through their interaction with UV light.
The communication campaign also includes artistic installations across USI’s campuses: five “Paste-up” artworks and a special installation to be unveiled during USI’s Open Day on May 10, 2025 (Universo: www.usi.ch/universo). The university community will actively participate in creating these artistic pieces, with moments dedicated to engaging the broader public, especially younger generations, who will have the opportunity to connect with the artist and contribute to his works.
Play your future Yuri Catania USI Università Svizzera Italiana
"Generoso Family" is the new street art piece by Yuri Catania, designed to explore the theme of biodiversity on Monte Generoso. It depicts a rich variety of wild animals and plants in relation to humans, symbolized by an astronaut tenderly embracing a stuffed bear.
The artist aims to provoke reflection on humanity’s relationship with nature. Although humans are a part of nature, they are becoming increasingly distanced from it due to technology. Rather than protecting the environment they live in, people choose to embrace a teddy bear, thinking it offers more comfort, but in reality, it’s just a surrogate for nature. This act holds a deeper provocation: despite being surrounded by a wonderful, vibrant natural world filled with unique animals, wild plants, and flowers, humans prefer the stuffed animal, likely because it offers them more control.
The artwork, an impressive 12 meters tall and 12 meters wide, is presented as a giant postcard of Monte Generoso with its snow-capped peak, an image captured by the artist during the winter season. Snow-covered landscapes are becoming rarer due to global warming, which is causing significant climate changes, even in our regions. The piece also includes representations of the vegetation of Val Mara, dominated by trees and forests such as chestnuts and maples, alongside non-native species like palm trees, which now coexist, creating a surreal environment and a false sense of biodiversity, caused by human intervention.
Catania continues by depicting all the animals that inhabit Monte Generoso today, including mammals like wild boars, foxes, deer, goats, hedgehogs, moles, and field mice, as well as the wolf, recently sighted in the area. Birds, such as the golden eagle, and reptiles like the asp viper, salamander, and toads, are also represented. The entire ecosystem is conceived as a kind of grand Noah’s Ark, with humans at its center. The artwork is further enriched by a wide variety of native flowers, such as the wild peony of Generoso, along with other flowers like crocuses and orchids in shades of lilac, violet, and fuchsia.
The message of the piece is to highlight the beautiful territory we live in and its inhabitants, encouraging greater respect and awareness of the fortune we have been given, and emphasizing the need to responsibly protect the natural cycle of biodiversity, which is an essential value of life.
From September 5 to 12, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, people are invited to dedicate an hour of time to contribute to the creation of the mural at Via Trivelli 11 in Rovio.
Join the artist in cutting and pasting activities and become an active part of a work that celebrates biodiversity and the wonderful territory of Monte Generoso.
To register, send an email to: hello@casagalleria.art or via WhatsApp: +41 79 137 31 11.
Official inauguration of the artwork:
Friday, September 13, 2024, at 6:00 PMVia Trivelli 11, Rovio
The mural is sponsored by Banca Raiffeisen Basso Ceresio and supported by Comune di Val Mara and Mendrisiotto Turismo.
Yuri Catania's street art dives into the depths of Lake Lugano, continuing an underwater journey with astronaut mermaids and local fish in a blend of above and below.
The participatory street art project "Lugaxy Axtro Flowers", created by Yuri Catania last September, continues its journey on the facade of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Lugano, embracing the theme of the Family Village inspired by "The Little Mermaid" from the book by Hans Christian Andersen.
The event will take place during the LongLake Festival, from July 11th to 14th, and will bring the artwork, featuring astronauts and flowers from Parco Ciani, to the depths of Lake Ceresio. There, it will discover an underwater world with astronaut mermaids and local fish, in a parallel to the previously represented space world.
Catania's idea is to bring the exploration between space, nature, and technology that inspired the previous work to a place equally unknown and mysterious: the depths of Lake Lugano. Here, the strongly distinguishable elements will be the local flora and fauna, depicted in a fanciful, abstract, and colorful setting.
Additionally, they will be represented as heroes and travelers in this story, a space version of "The Little Mermaid," with groups of people, figures of children, and adults as explorers.
The surreal world depicted will overlap but not replace the previous installation, connecting and completing in a new way what was already created on the entire facade of the Palazzo dei Congressi, in a blend of above and below.
The participatory work is open to everyone, adults and children, who wish to contribute at least one hour of their time to its realization. It is possible to do so by signing up through the following form link, during the Family Village days, from July 11th to July 14th, from 4:00 PM to 9:30 PM.