ZED1 “No Poverty” mural in Turin, Italy

Italian street artist ZED1 is one of seventeen artists who were recently invited by the city of Turin in Italy to create a mural as part of a project intended to give shape to the United Nations Global Goals.

The first of those goals is No Poverty, which became the title of ZED1’s new mural that reflects this important issue. Ending all forms of poverty in the world is actually not just an economic question. Poverty can take many forms and is triggered by numerous causes such as wars, hunger, limited access to adequate education, social and cultural conditions, discrimination, and any denial in the decision-making processes of today’s societies.ss

In 2014, 42000 people each day left their homes due to conflicts. Today, approximately 836 million people in the world live in extreme poverty, with less than 1.25$ a day, and the vast majority of them are concentrated in highly exploited countries such as the Sub-Saharan or the South Asian regions.

Having this in mind, and the complexity of the theme, ZED1 tried to create a more conceptual mural. At the center of the composition we find one of ZED1’s characters, partially inside a red rose. A shining sun filters through what the artist calls ‘evil clouds’ which carry war, hunger, exploitation, pollution, corruption, disease and misery. The clouds are hold apart by hands on each side of the center of the motive. The sun rays illuminate a wallet that opens in the shape of a field of grass and stones. It is from here that the red rose seems to spring and our character materialises carrying and cherishing a coin, a piece of bread and a house. The area beneath the rose is green and fertile, while in the shaded areas flowers have withered.
From left to right, the wicked clouds are the representations of corruption, in the shape of a man wearing a balaclava and holding a briefcase full of money; lack of adequate education, in the shape of a broken book; war and imprisonment, represented by a machine gun and some barbed wire; the health system disservice, represented by a Red Cross falling sign; the issue of living in dangerous places, shown through a ruined building; the lack of resources, represented by a broken rake; pollution, shown with a crude oil barrel.

The hands holding up the wallet are the same ones that take care of removing the clouds, because only the conscious actions of mankind can bring the real change.

About the artist
Marco Burresi is Italian street artist who is better known in art world as Zed1. Born 1977 in Florence Tuscany, ZED1 started painting walls about 20 years ago and is best known for his murals of egg headed humans and curious critters that have decked walls from Amsterdam to New York.
His artworks can be characterised by a good dose of humour, a very unique and personal style, his recognisable figures, use of colour and his close eye for details. For his works he says they are a juice of his experiences. He also loves to challenge and he creates an interaction with his audience. Through a constant and varied development of the technique, his style evolves accordingly to his work as writer, which leads him to paint trains, walls and surfaces of all kinds. Following his predilection for imagery, he succeeds in creating a world of humanoid puppets, which, in their illusory sterility, interact with the world around them, evolving both in space and time (as in the recent “Second Skin”). Zed1 moves, through a fine dance of shapes and colours, in a post-modern surrealism that, even in its most irrational features, refers to a clear awareness, sometimes melancholy, sometimes extraordinarily ironic.

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