An immersive archive of independent Italian culture, tracing a decade of groundbreaking creativity across comics, illustration, and street art
HIU was fundamental to my growth—I grew up inside that imagery. The best, those I considered the true masters of comics, illustration, and street graffiti, were all there, within that event. I exhibited and experienced many editions, not only at Leoncavallo but also in other Italian cities. In this book, I find friends, faces some of whom are no longer with us, others who have since become stars, and yet others who continue to live art in a radical way, staying on the margins and producing pure work, without mediation or compromise, outside official publishing.
Inside, you will also find some texts and interviews I conducted a few years ago with Alberto Corradi and Claudio Calia, when we began outlining the story of those years and that unique season in a project called “Znort!” Thanks to Marco for this immense work: a precious brick in the wall of our collective memory.
HIU 1993–2003, curated by Marco Teatro, is not just a book: it is a living archive, an emotional and visual atlas that captures the strength of an era when independent practices, fanzines, and self-publishing were the underground veins of Italian visual culture.
HIU—short for Happening Internazionale Underground—was an annual three-day event held in Milan from 1993 to 2003, a completely independent and self-managed gathering that, during the transition from analog to digital, influenced and contaminated the Italian comics and art publishing scene. Born to promote underground figurative culture free from political constraints, HIU fostered avant-garde graphics and editorial experimentation, bringing together artists, illustrators, graffiti writers, comic artists, and designers in a crossroads of real confrontation and collective creation.
In the early ’90s, everything seemed possible. The internet was not yet widespread, computer use was limited, and print-on-demand was a distant dream. All you needed was paper, markers, rivers of ink, a typewriter, white-out, and a shaky photocopier—often a source of frustration—inks to fix mistakes, and long nights to align the pages of a layout that someone would inevitably mess up again by trying to set it before feeding it into another photocopier. Everyone wanted to create their own fanzine, people went to newsstands to study historic magazines, talked a lot, drank even more, dreaming of huge paychecks and the chance to be published in those pages. Some saved their first real earnings to launch their own magazine, making pilgrimages to printers and photolithographers for often impossible quotes, moving from rotary presses to the nightmare of nonexistent distribution. Copies were sent to anyone who might review them; presentations were held in friendly bookstores and social centers; packages with dedications were sent out, hoping those boxes full of dreams would reach someone.
In 1993, the word of HU began to spread—a buzz traveling through the Northeast and across the country. That’s how we arrived in Milan, backpacks full of copies and hope, excited and feeling out of place, stepping for the first time into the Centro Autogestito Garibaldi among stands, exhibitions, and friends who counted themselves like warriors of an underground scene ready to become an army. It was a magical moment: individual egos gave way to dialogue and a new collective awareness about what we were creating. We didn’t yet realize it, but we had embarked on a journey that would forever change our path and that of Italian comics.
By the sixth edition, in May 2000 at Milan’s Leoncavallo, the Happening Internazionale Underground was already a fixed point, an event that kept alive the independent spirit and communal drive, as shown in a photo capturing Chuck Sperry and Giampo Copparoni amid the photocopiers that made it all possible.
Those photocopiers now lie broken, scattered pieces in forgotten archives. With HIU 1993–2003 we have chosen to reassemble those fragments, to restore memory and reveal the truth of a period that was pivotal for Italian comics art and publishing. A wreck, but once reassembled, it becomes a huffing, muscular creature fueled by the energy that animated a group of twenty-somethings and just beyond.
Marco Teatro, through this volume, reconstructs that unrepeatable experience with original materials, flyers, pages, photocopied magazines, posters, and the voices of those who lived those years with hunger for the future. Flipping through the book, you encounter violent colors, hybrid compositions between comics, illustration, and street art, and the collective energy of those who believed images could change the world—or at least the course of a life.
The volume includes texts by Boris Battaglia, Gianluca Costantini, Giampo Coppa, Alberto Corradi, Dast, Diavù, Chuck Sperry, Squaz, Marco Teatro, and Stefano Zattera, weaving together memories, visions, and reflections on what it means to build independent culture. The texts are translated by Ivan Franzini, the graphics by Maurizio Ercole, and the editorial curation by Marco Teatro, who restores HIU’s nature as a permanent work in progress.
HIU 1993–2003 is not just a collection of images: it is an invitation to rethink printing as an act of resistance, self-production as a tool of community, and art’s social function as a concrete possibility. It is a book that tells ten years of creative frontier, speaking even today to those who want to work outside the rules and build new possibilities with coherence and generosity.
Edited by Marco Teatro
Publisher: In Your Face Comix
Pages: 292 pages, full color cover and interiors
Format: 21 x 30 cm
Binding: Paperback with flaps
ISBN: 9788897571858
Price: €35.00
About the editor, Marco Teatro:
Artist, painter, and set designer, pioneer of Italian street art. From 1993 to 2003, he created and organized the HIU Happening Internazionale Underground in Milan, which brought together illustrators, artists, and street artists from around the world. In 2003, during the 9th edition of HIU, Teatro inaugurated one of the first contemporary Italian street art exhibitions. His artistic production includes paintings, sculptures, and street art works. His pieces have been exhibited in galleries and museums such as PAC in Milan, the Farnesina in Rome, and the United Nations headquarters in New York. For years, he has collaborated on large-scale artistic installations, shows, and international events, as well as creating props and stage designs. In 2021, he published La guerra dei segni. Un’altra storia dell’arte with Agenzia X publishing house, and the book Virus – il punk è rumore with Giacomo Spazio, published by Goodfellas.
