Bilbao effect

Tupac Statue at Marta museum in Herford, Germany

The statue was created by Italian artist Paolo Chiasera.

: Artist Interviewed in London in May :

Hans Ulrich Obrist:
 
A monument?

An urban project? I wonder, did Tupac see himself as an urban thinker and what would he think of the way the project was organized?

Paolo Chiasera:

The TUPAC PROJECT consists of the construction of a monument dedicated to Tupac Amaru

Shakur, the Black Panther rapper who died in ‘96 in a Las Vegas gang feud.

I wanted to try to create an alternative map of the world, using as a basis the ideas behind – or, at any rate, what has become known as – “underground culture”.

The statue is made of concrete, rising from the street, as if an earthquake had pushed it up from its roots; it’s a life-size classical statue of Tupac, whose own life led him far from the straight and narrow path of the kind of person such monuments normally cele