ABSTRACT
Soliciting members of the general public to actively participate in their work, Franco Vaccari and Maurizio Nannucci offered a platform for Vox Populi—the opportunity to photographically represent and vocally express themselves. This chapter analyzes art projects that engaged with civic participation in public spaces as a way of giving a voice to the people. Nannucci carried out one of his best-known projects, Parole/mots/word/wörter, in 1976, in which he interviewed passersby in the streets of Florence, asking them to utter the first word that came to mind. He transformed the interviews into an installation comprising of slide projections and a sound recording: each pedestrian thus became an integral part of the work, and the word sequence sounded much like a lexicon for the decade, such as “ciao,” “home,” “bread,” “crisis,” and “tension.” Throughout the 1970s, he worked on the series Esposizione in tempo reale.
