I’ve always believed that public space is the most powerful—and most overlooked—canvas for cultural transformation. Not the sterile kind of culture locked behind velvet ropes, but something alive, integrated into our everyday lives. That was the path that took me to MUM – Metro Urban Museum in the city of Brescia, Italy.
What if a metro wasn’t just about transportation?
What if every ride was also an encounter with contemporary art, design, and imagination?
That’s the premise behind MUM—a new kind of museum: mobile, public, and alive. And Brescia, with its clean, modern, driverless metro system, became the perfect place to prototype it. It’s not just a local experiment. My ambition is to turn this into a global format, something other cities and mobility companies can adopt, adapt, and make their own.
Peeta’s Explicit Dynamics: last Activation
To launch MUM with Metro Brescia, Brescia Mobilità and Comune di Brescia, I invited the incredible Italian artist Peeta (Manuel Di Rita) to create a site-specific mural inside the metro. I’ve long admired his ability to distort space through illusion—fusing 3D abstraction, typography, and architecture into something that feels both futuristic and grounded.
His piece, Explicit Dynamics, isn’t just stunning—it’s conceptually rooted. Inspired by the scientific method of the same name (used to simulate fluid motion at high speeds), Peeta translated the energy of metropolitan movement into a visual field of kinetic forms. It’s as if the wall is breathing, shifting, caught in the invisible currents of urban life.
At the center is a bold exclamation mark—reimagined not just as punctuation, but as a symbol of velocity, urgency, and transformation. For me, it perfectly captures the spirit of a city in motion. It’s also a visual declaration of what MUM stands for: art that is explicit, dynamic, and alive in public space.
Peeta’s mural doesn’t impose itself. It responds to the architecture of the station, amplifying the structure instead of hiding it. It invites you to question what’s real, what’s painted, what’s solid. This tension between illusion and materiality is exactly what I wanted MUM to provoke.
An Art Train That Moves With You
But as usual we didn’t stop at one wall. We also launched MUM’s fourth Art Train: a fully customized metro train inspired by Peeta’s visual language. Every ride becomes a curated experience—color, geometry, and movement wrapping the vehicle.
It’s not branding. It’s not decoration. It’s a mobile exhibition space, blurring the lines between design and daily life.
Every passenger is now a visitor.
Every journey, a moving artwork.
From Brescia to the World
MUM is the first conceptualization of a living format for metro systems worldwide. It’s designed to grow—across cities, cultures, and continents. What we’re doing in Brescia is just the beginning. I want to bring this approach to metro systems around the world, collaborating with artists, curators, transport networks, and urban thinkers.
In a time when cities are searching for new narratives and ways to connect with their citizens, I believe transit systems—those arteries of modern life—can become cultural spaces, not just corridors. I assert this with deep respect for the origins of uncommissioned early graffiti writers who instinctively chose moving subway trains as their first canvas—a raw, defiant gesture that gave birth to a global visual language.
The museum of the future doesn’t need walls.
It travels. It pulses through public space.
It speaks to everyone, on the move.
