Carlo Sampietro

Street Scraper is a site-specific installation that examines the perceptual and symbolic transformation of contemporary urban space, addressing the progressive erosion of the street as a place of social encounter. The work reconstructs a fragment of sidewalk through the emergence of recognizable urban elements—police barricades, newspaper dispensers, a fire hydrant, traffic barrels, a manhole cover, and a pole with parking regulation signage—reconfigured as a participatory, ludic device resembling a mini-golf course.

Objects originally conceived to regulate, separate, and discipline urban flows are transformed into instruments of connection and collective passage. Barricades, traditionally associated with control and restriction, become points of encounter; traffic signage, commonly perceived as a source of frustration, becomes the final “hole” of a shared game. In this functional displacement, the installation subverts the normative grammar of the city and proposes a temporary, symbolic reappropriation of public space.

The work reflects critically on how urban furniture and infrastructure shape emotional and cognitive perceptions of the metropolitan landscape, often functioning as obstacles or devices of control. Street Scraper instead operates as an infrastructure of encounter, reactivating a collective memory of the street as an extension of domestic space: a site of play, proximity, and intergenerational coexistence.