Platea Palazzo Galeano celebrates its fourth birthday with the well-established format of Buon Compleanno Platea! 

The showcase space, from 2022, multiplies and spreads throughout the citythrough posters created by young Lodi creatives with the supportof Banca Centropadana. Like last year, the project is structured as an artist's workshop, in collaboration with the Liceo artistico Callisto Piazza of Lodi and Professors Luca Armigero and Maria Teresa Carossa. 

Leading the fourth edition of Buon Compleanno Platea! is the artist Marvin Gabriele Nwachukwu, one of the protagonists of Platea's exhibition program, Nine Out of Ten Movie Stars Make Me Cry, curated by Gabriella Rebello Kolandra. The workshop, curated by Bianca Basile, was triggered by reflections on the identity relationship between the individual – or community – and urban space. When does a space represent us? What makes it collective? How do we share that belonging with other people and communities who pass through it for the first time or for a lifetime?

The reasoning was developed with classe III D and took graphic form through three meetings conducted in the classroom by Marvin Gabriele Nwachukwu. The exchange with the public is a crucial moment in the artist's creative process and his works reflect the context they inhabit. In his research, Nwachukwu investigates, among others, the semi-public places associated with wide-ranging publishing – from the newsstand to the copy shop – and the spaces of sharing in print media. 

During the fourth classroom meeting, as every year, the games will also acquire the postcard format and be collected in a custom-made box. On the occasion of this edition, however, the relationship space of the project is further multiplied along with the devices used. The games, disseminated in the center of Lodi through hundreds of posters that can be filled in by citizens, bypass the billposting space and urban boundaries, landing on two pages of the Cittadino, the Lodigiano and Sudmilano daily newspaper, thanks to the further support of Banca Centropadana.

The two devices allow for the contamination of spaces and times, placing today's students alongside fellow citizens in the newspaper and making legitimate an action that usually is not: writing on posters. The bond is plural, as symbolized by the three matrices of the posters, but immediately identifiable in the aggregating foundations of the city and its inhabitants.

The expressive medium of puzzle games was chosen as an instrument for the city's identity definition, and participation. The starting target – class III D and thus, more generally, the young students of Lodi and the province – was expanded, in thinking up the games, to include different communities of possible recipients, both in an intergenerational sense and taking into account the different degrees of knowledge of the city on the part of the possible players. 

The focus of the work was self-expression – in an individual and collective sense – starting from the material and immaterial, more and less formal culture of the city, which was thus returned in a multifaceted image, of historical and personal scope, a platform for recognition and comparison for those who live it and feel they belong to it. 

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