MAUA special edition

Urban art comes to life. Territories become laboratories. Communities take center stage.

MAUA – Special Edition is a project born from a simple yet radical question:
what happens when urban art meets augmented reality, education, and local communities?

The answer is a museum you don’t visit—you move through.
A process that doesn’t merely produce artworks, but builds skills, relationships, and shared visions.
An experience that transforms city walls into living cultural interfaces, accessible to everyone.

Promoted by Bepart within the framework of the PNRR – NextGenerationEU, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture, MAUA – Special Edition is the evolution of MAUA – the Augmented Urban Art Museum, one of the first distributed augmented reality museums in Italy.

A museum without doors, inside the cities

MAUA has no tickets, opening hours, or exhibition rooms.
It is activated by walking, observing, listening.
All it takes is a smartphone to see digital stories, animations, sounds, and narratives emerge where there was once only a wall.

With MAUA – Special Edition, this model also becomes a tool for growth:
not only access, but capacity building; not only technology, but cultural autonomy.

Five territories, one creative ecosystem

The project involved five Italian territories, different in history and geography yet united by a strong connection to urban art and cultural experimentation:
Santa Croce di Magliano (Molise), Aielli (Abruzzo), Diamante (Calabria), Cosenza (Calabria), Florence (Tuscany), Favara (Sicily).

In each location, MAUA – Special Edition activated local networks of organizations, cultural operators, artists, and communities, working side by side to create tailored pathways rooted in local contexts and open to innovation.

Not a course, but a journey

MAUA – Special Edition is not a top-down project.
It is a long, shared, hands-on journey that weaves together education, design, and production.

The program included:

• shared sessions to build a common language;
• specialized lectures with artists, curators, researchers, and technology experts;
• one-to-one meetings to support each territory’s specific needs;
• design thinking workshops to turn ideas into concepts;
• 2D and 3D multimedia animation workshops;
• 300 hours of on-the-job mentoring, moving from concept to artwork.

An experience designed to learn by doing—by experimenting, making mistakes, refining, and growing together.

Over 150 augmented reality artworks

At the heart of the project are the artworks.
More than 150 digital augmented reality contents emerged from collective work involving digital artists, local organizations, and trainers.

These works interact with murals and urban spaces, tell local stories, activate new interpretations of the landscape, and are accessible through the Bepart app, updated and enhanced during the project.

Each artwork is the result of a careful balance between artistic research, technological experimentation, territorial storytelling, accessibility, and attention to audiences.

From training to the street: tours and public engagement

The project opened to the public through a phase of inauguration and activation, turning territories into spaces for encounter and discovery.

A total of 24 guided augmented reality tours were delivered, allowing citizens, visitors, schools, and cultural professionals to experience MAUA firsthand.