Verdi Street Parade 2025
Tutto il mondo è burla!
Artistic Direction
Imaginarium curated the Verdi Street Parade 2025, collaborating with schools, youth centers and dance schools to create a procession that transformed Parma into an open-air stage.
For the 2025 edition of Verdi Off, Imaginarium curated the Verdi Street Parade, taking care of the artistic direction and overall coordination. Our curatorship oversaw the entire process: from the concept design to the creation of the route, up to the harmonization of the artistic contributions that turned the parade into a truly collective event.
A key element was the collaboration with local schools, youth centers, and dance schools, whose performances and creativity helped make the parade a vibrant and participatory experience. Thanks to this shared effort, the streets of Parma were transformed into a collective celebration, weaving together music, dance, and community around Verdi’s cultural legacy.
I BOZZETTI
To accompany and give visual form to the Verdi Street Parade 2025, Imaginarium created a series of original sketches designed to capture the soul of the procession even before it came to life in the streets of Parma.
These drawings, conceived as true preparatory boards, served a dual purpose: on one hand as working tools, useful for coordinating the various groups involved – schools, youth centers, and dance schools – and on the other as autonomous artworks, able to convey the atmosphere and imagery of the parade.
Ink lines and essential strokes defined the shapes of floats and mobile installations, while the use of color highlighted the festive, ironic, and popular character of the event, in continuity with Verdi’s spirit of “All the world’s a jest!”. The sketches contain scenographic elements inspired by theater and tradition, but reinterpreted in a contemporary key, with a direct and accessible graphic language, capable of speaking both to professionals and to younger audiences.
These boards were not only a project stage but also a creative bridge between idea and reality: they made it possible to imagine the procession, to share its vision with participants, and to transform the energy of the groups involved into a collective visual narrative.
The sketches therefore narrate not only the scenic aspect of the Street Parade but also the process that generated it: a choral, shared, and participatory work, where the graphic sign became the first spark of a celebration that came to life in the streets of Parma.