Arte indifesa – Rome Art Week 2026

I don't want a wall to deface.
I don't want to decorate absence anymore.

Arteindifesa is a site-specific, distributed art project dedicated each year to a different neighbourhood of Rome.

The idea is to entrust the public, indirectly, with the welcoming, care and preservation of completely defenceless original artworks, created using techniques and materials chosen to make them harmless, resistant, essential, and above all removable.

The first edition, “26 Spirits cross the Bridges”, was dedicated entirely to the Laurentino 38–Fonte Ostiense neighbourhood during Rome Art Week 2024, from Monday 21 to Saturday 26 October 2024.

The second edition, “Piccolo Popolo”, involved several neighbourhoods of Rome: places where I have lived, worked, and places I have loved. From Monday 21 to Saturday 26 October 2025, the small people of my walker-gatherers challenged yet another bottleneck in the city streets for one week.

From 6 May 2026 to 10 January 2027, Arteindifesa arrived at Sapienza University of Rome with the work “La fine delle guerre”, as part of the group exhibition *La calma assente – Costruire la pace – Storie antiche urgenze presenti*, at the Museo dell’Arte Classica, Sapienza University of Rome, curated by Irene Baldriga and the Sapienza Curatorial Team.

During Rome Art Week 2026, “Arteindifesa – Be kind”, in collaboration with Betterpress Roma, involves the production and printing—partly digital and partly using movable type—of 21 posters, each measuring 70 × 100 cm, on the theme of kindness. The posters, which are always removable, follow a circular route embracing the city of Rome and passing through its peripheral neighbourhoods.

Arte indifesa – Be kind

(…) in unsaid reply you note how one silent breath
*is more wondrous than a thousand speeches.

(…) come muta risposta nota come un solo silente respiro
sia più prodigioso di mille discorsi.*

Martin W. Bennett,
Opinionaters

We need kindness. Not the kindness of behaviour or good manners. Kindness is a way of being, of thinking, of living with the awareness that we exist together with others; that the quality of human relationships, far more than even the most extreme weather phenomena, influences everything around us and determines its future.

I do not consider myself a particularly gentle person—in fact, quite the opposite. I have, however, had the opportunity to meet people with whom I have experienced a different way of thinking: a gentle way of thinking that helps me understand and find my way through the contradictions of the world.

Arteindifesa – Be kind is dedicated to all these people. One person in particular contributed directly to its creation: my friend, the English poet and translator Martin Wilmot Bennett. Besides helping me appreciate poetry and the English language, he generously translated numerous poetic texts for me, including the unpublished versions of the haiku that inspired the watercolours in this work.

The choice of Japanese haiku, adapted by an English poet, was a natural one. It brings together languages and images from opposite ends of the world, while each haiku contains the immediate poetic quality of an emotion that lasts for a very brief time but instantly becomes a memory, like happiness.

Betterpress and Arteindifesa

Arte indifesa – Be kind is a distributed art intervention conceived by Alessandro Ferraro and created in collaboration with Betterpress for Rome Art Week 2026.

Betterpress created a hand-lettering intervention, composing the verses with original vintage Letraset transfer lettering, placed in direct relation to the watercolours. The text thus enters the surface of the works, letter by letter, crossing their spaces, pauses and forms, engaging in dialogue with the images and becoming part of them.

The compositions were subsequently digitised and reproduced as 21 posters measuring 70 × 100 cm. The title was then printed in movable type on each of the 21 posters, making every copy unique and unrepeatable.

Each poster is photographed and geolocated through **#arteindifesa-map** and accompanied by a QR code directing visitors to a short video describing the work. On the final day of Rome Art Week, all the posters are removed.

At [www.instagram.com/arteindifesa](http://www.instagram.com/arteindifesa) and [www.nuvolavaga.com/arteindifesa](http://www.nuvolavaga.com/arteindifesa), stop-motion videos documenting the making of the watercolours will be published, accompanied by readings of the poetic texts and musical pieces by Kwaaui.

Special thanks to Pioda Imaging for their courtesy and generous support, and to Enrico Natoli for his careful supervision of the entire printing process.

Arte indifesa – Be kind

A project by Alessandro Ferraro
Typographic intervention: Francesca Colonia and Giulia Nicolai / Betterpress
English versions of the haiku: Martin Wilmot Bennett
Printing: Pioda Imaging
Print supervision: Enrico Natoli
Music for the stop-motion videos: Kwaaui




Martin Wilmot Bennett (1952–2025) was a British academic, poet and translator, born in Birmingham and based in Rome from 2001.
After graduating in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, he spent many years teaching English abroad, including eight years in West Africa and later in the Middle East. After moving to Italy, he began a long-standing collaboration with the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where he worked for many years as an English-language lecturer and as a proofreader of scientific texts in the fields of science and the humanities.
Alongside his academic career, Bennett was a respected literary author in the United Kingdom. He won the John Clare Poetry Prize in 2013 for his poetry and the John Dryden Translation Prize in 2015 for his translations from Italian literature, including notable work on Giorgio Caproni and Primo Levi.
He lived in Rome, a city to which he also dedicated numerous articles on history and art for Wanted in Rome. His collection of poems Loose Watches was published by University of Salzburg Press. Three of his stories were broadcast on BBC World Service.