From 1 July 2015, for the whole of summer and up until 30 September, the city will be populated by the large posters created by Maurizio Cattelan, the most famous and controversial Italian contemporary artist, together with Pierpaolo Ferrari and the Toiletpaper team: postcards that Rimini is sending to itself, revealing its symbolism, its qualities and contradictions, the points of contact and of divergence between imagination and reality.

The project was specially designed for the city, and curated by Maria Cristina Didero.

Rimini is the city in which, in the collective imagination, opposites meet. The chaos of the tourist season is replaced by the deserted beaches of winter; parties and discos fade and are replaced by cultural events. The summer, so keenly desired, with its beauty and enjoyment, becomes the mundane reality of mass tourism with its overpowering odour of suncream. There is Fellini, and the classic local snack piadina. Over the last century, Rimini has succeeded in accelerating at every historical crossroads, often anticipating the changes in Italian society, from the boom years of the 1960s, right through to the problems and austerity of the 1980s and ‘90s, up until today and the desire to change course.

Maurizio Cattelan, the most successful and provocative Italian artist today, is the ideal personality for the interpretation of a city with such a vast heritage of expectations, motifs and symbolism. Since 2010 Cattelan has been producing the magazine Toiletpaper with Pierpaolo Ferrari, a publication that has been celebrated all over the world for the irony of its biting, seductive imagery, a hybrid between contemporary art and advertising aesthetics.

Cattelan and Ferrari have chosen eight powerful and allusive images from the Toiletpaper archives, pictures that capture Rimini’s symbolic meanings, in an unusual narrative that expresses both a critical stance and the nobility of the entire country. From 1 July to 30 September the images will appear on billboards in locations that are important for the city’s identity, forming a diffuse portrait in which Rimini forms both the venue and the subject.

Maria Cristina Didero has said: “Rimini’s rich imagery, with the contemporaneous, bulimic presence of ancient and modern, tradition and innovation, speed and slowness, with its multiple facets of sea, countryside, holiday atmosphere, a cosmopolitan identity along with powerful links to its roots, is an unparalleled stimulus for contemporary culture. This public project is a remarkable opportunity to observe the city in all its complexity, through the biting vision of Toiletpaper by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. Toiletpaper succeeds in projecting the icons of Rimini in a series of images based on contrast and short-circuit: with their vision, Cattelan and Ferrari have given the city of Rimini a new viewpoint onto reality”.

The images will be exhibited in Piazzale Cesare Battisti, at the bridge Ponte di Tiberio, at the triumphal arch Arco d’Augusto, in Piazzale Fellini, on the big wheel at Porto Canale, in Piazzale Toscanini, at the castle Castel Sismondo and on the building site for the theatre Teatro Galli. They will also be shown across the conventional circuit of advertising posters, increasing their evocative power as if in a photographic self-portrait taken in a house of mirrors.