USI launches the "Play your future" communication campaign

The new communication campaign "Play your future", an innovative and artistic project that presents Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) as a place of opportunities, has kicked off. With this initiative, USI emphasises the centrality of its students, to whom it offers an inclusive, creative and dynamic space for growth and education.

USI is a people-oriented university where everyone can discover and make their voice heard, cultivating their talent and uniqueness: this is supported by the testimonies of students and alumni from all USI Faculties. The artist chosen for the campaign is Yuri Catania, a visual artist based in Ticino. He is known for his ephemeral street art and ability to blend physical and digital art using innovative techniques such as paste-up and augmented reality. Catania's artistic vision plays a crucial role in visually representing concepts of growth as both a natural and personal journey. This is symbolically depicted through his colourful portrayals of flowers overlaid on black-and-white photographic portraits. His artistic approach consistently incorporates natural elements that engage in dialogue with the subjects of his works. The choice of flowers symbolises USI as a fertile environment where students can grow and blossom to their full potential. Each painting features vibrant colours representing the various faculties' unique characteristics: green for economics, blue for communication, yellow for informatics, red for biomedicine, grey for architecture, and purple for theology. This chromatic and botanical language emphasises the uniqueness of each academic path and personal development in a dialogue between the subject of the image and the artist's pictorial intervention, which expresses its growth.

Thanks to the Artivive augmented reality software, these images come to life with videos recounting the personal experiences of the protagonists and explaining how USI helped to kick-start (play) their journey. Another feature of the original works becomes visible in the dark when exposed to a UV lamp.

The communication campaign will also take the form of art installations on university campuses: five "Paste-up" works and another installation will be presented during USI Open Day on 10 May 2025 (UniVerso: www.usi.ch/universo). The university community will actively participate in creating the art installations. There will also be dedicated moments for the broader public, especially the younger generations, who will have the opportunity to engage with the artist and contribute to his works. 

USI Rector Luisa Lambertini statement: "I am grateful to the artist Yuri Catania for having succeeded in visually expressing the growth of our students as a natural, dynamic and personal process. USI offers precisely this: an inclusive space to grow, to learn, to engage with each other on an international level and to make the most of one's talent, thus setting the tone for one's future."

The campaign content is available at www.usi.ch/play and the official hashtag on social media is #playyourfuture.

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Università della Svizzera italiana
USI is one of the twelve public universities officially recognised by the Swiss academic system, coordinated by swissuniversities. It is organised into six faculties and is active in various field of study and research, namely architecture, communication, law, economics, informatics, medicine and biomedicine, public health, computational science, data science and humanities.

Yuri Catania
A visual artist known for his expertise in creating giant ephemeral street art installations using the paste-up technique, he transforms his photographic works into live performances involving the public through volunteers of all ages and cultures. His photography dominates urban and architectural environments with sustainable materials such as paper printed with water-based inks and wheat starch glue. He produces works by creating compositions of clippings of his photographs for which he creates extra digital content, photographic or video, that he connects through augmented reality, building a bridge between physical and digital art.

Artivive, the App that brings art to life
A technology company specialising in augmented reality art founded in 2017 and based in Vienna, Austria, Artivive enables artists to connect traditional and digital art. The App, which can be downloaded free of charge for different mobile devices, allows users to delve deeper into the subjects of the work by accessing other multimedia content through augmented reality.