Tagliatelle with meat sauce, hand-made fresh pasta with bolognese sauce, tortellini, typical hand-made fresh filled pasta, wood chopping board with typical ready-sliced meat and cheese, gourmet burgers, gluten-free, handcrafted beers … “typical”, “authentic” … too much food, food everywhere, authentic? Bologna City of Food says a tourist brand, “Bologna the Fat” first became obese and then bulimic, spectacular manger, a CITY OF FOOD PORN.
The Work
Since few years Bologna has increased tourism by opening low cost routes in the city hub. Low cost tourism means, usually, a kind of tourism which is low-mid budget and three days long (a week end or little bit more). In italian we have an expression that is “mordi e fuggi” which means “touch and go” or “short-break” and it’s ironic because litterally “mordi e fuggi” has to be translated as “bite and run” and as we are talking basically of food tourism it is perfect.
In some strategic spots tourist are asked to answer to a questionnaire on the perception of the city of Bologna: they point out “authenticity”.
Basing on this answer it has been pushed the opening of many bar and restaurants because Bologna has an historical tradition of food and eat that roots in the middle age.
This is a paradox: to give “authenticity” to tourists it has been decided within a marketing strategy to open new activities…this “authenticity” is not genuine at all. Moreover to communicate easily this “authenticity” to foreign tourists it has born a brand: “Bologna City of Food” in response to tourist’s desire of “authenticity” but damaging the offer for citizens because it led to one obvious result: identical, flat places, quickly grown prices.
This brand appears heavily in the whole touristic promotion of the city, and it’s not that bed except that all the other cultural proposals almost disappear.
So, many places opened with the same proposal, no matter and no difference if you open a bar, a grocery store or a restaurant, everybody offers traditional dishes and traditional products (as we started to produce craft beer as we have always been beer makers! I’m not saying we’re not good at craft beers but it’s not “authentic”, for sure!)
Bologna has always been known as “Bologna la grassa” (fat Bologna) because of its food tradition but nowadays would be more correct talk about “obese Bologna” or even “bulimic Bologna” (because 60% of activities opened between 2010 and 2015 have already closed or changed management) due to this uncontrolled proliferation of food activities under the “Bologna City of Food” brand.
“Bologna City of Food Porn” is a counter-branding work to underline the risk of that phenomenon.
Artwork is an installation of a soft pink neon phrase “Bologna City of Food Porn” combined with 2000 stickers with the same phrase introduced by the hashtag sign that we offer to Fair audience asking to label Food Porn situation in the City and then take pictures of this and upload on social networks to create a new semantic cloud.
