Gianni Pettena was born in Bolzano in 1940 and studied architecture at the University of Florence. In 1971, he was invited to the United States as an artist-in-residence at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He was later assigned as professor at the School of Architecture of the University of Florence and, beginning in 1980, he held a course on design at the School of Architecture of the California State University. He displayed his works at many international exhibitions, including the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1978, 1980, and 1996, and Manifesta 7 in 2008.
The UFO group was founded in 1967 on the wave of the student protest movement at the School of Architecture of the University of Florence. Its founders were Lapo Binazzi (Florence, 1943), Riccardo Foresi (Florence, 1941), Titti Maschietto (Viareggio, 1942), Carlo Bachi (Pisa, 1939), and Patrizia Cammeo (Florence, 1943). Their aim was to showcase architecture in an attempt to transform it into an event, an action of urban and environmental ‘guerrilla warfare’.

– title: Dialogo Pettena Arnolfo / Superurboeffimero 7

– date: 1968

– medium: installation, happening

– size: environment

– description: Gianni Pettena’s installation entitled Dialogo Pettena Arnolfo (which could be translated as A Dialogue between Pettena and Arnolfo) and the happening created by the UFO group were submitted in the 1968 edition of the Masaccio Painting Awards. Pettena closed the portico of Palazzo d’Arnolfo with panels painted with large slanting black and silver stripes and created a gallery space that was completely alien to the Renaissance structure of the building. The aim of the artist was to make the building appear as a “façade sequence” by walling up the openings of the portico and create indoor premises that would accommodate the exhibition. A few months later, once the installation had been disassembled, the original perception of the place would be returned to both locals and visitors.

The UFO group’s happening was entitled Superurboeffimero no. 7 and consisted in staging a drama featuring the arrival of extraterrestrial beings on Palazzo d’Arnolfo roof, a bizarre competition between ordinary chicken and Venusian ‘urbo-chicken’, and the dramatic wedding in the square opposite the building between a giant papier-mâché sculpture representing Anita Ekberg and the statue of Garibaldi. The event staged by UFO aroused great scandal and controversial debates. Umberto Eco took sides in favour of the happening and held a lecture on semiology, in which he defined Superurbeffimero no. 7 as a “synchronic semiological elaboration”.