Milano, Italy🇮🇹
Lusvardi Gallery
16.6.2023 ➝ 14.7.2023
Group exhibition with Vincent Grunwald and Giacomo Serpani
Photos by Toni Brugnoli
Text by Vincent Grunwald
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“Fasade (engl.) Facciata (ital.) Fassade (dt.) Fachada (es.)”
Buildings are the vertical dimension of the city map. They rise from the soil and consist of capsuled roots in the shape of basements and catacombs that can give them stability or protect them from water. The buildings are usually aligned towards the street, creating a valley that channels the passengers in mainly two directions. The valley consists of the street, the sidewalk and is limited by the buildings.
Parallel to the valley, water, electricity, gas and telecommunication are channelled through tubes and cables, connecting different parts and and creating differently shaped networks. All of these networks also expand vertically in space connecting living units in buildings, that are arranged on top of each other. Rain Pipes collect the rain that falls on the buildings roof and channel it towards the canalisation. There is a spring born on the roof gathering water, concentrating it with all those leaves and dust bundled into one and turning it into a river running below the city by the name of canalisation.
The facades of the buildings are their public display, their face. The buildings communicate through their facade with the public. The face of the building talks about its owners taste, about how good the building is taken care of, if it gets cleaned or not, if there is vacant flats or not. Every Building has a main entrance, the gate that connects the public and the interior of the house. Everything that enters the house has to pass the gate. The facade is hiding many underlying processes that are taking place inside of the building.
The windows are the witness to the streets. During night they communicate if the light of a flat is turned on or not and by that indicating possible activity. They might as well tell if somebody is still awake.
Windows could let you get a look inside of the flat, the atmosphere of that living space. If there is movement on inhabitants or a television turned on that leads to horrendous shadows on the walls once somebody walks in front of it. A person could be smoking at the window and be a secret observer of the streets. The facades are the display of possible witnesses of what is happening on the street.
The exhibition facades is uniting artist from Argentina German and Italy that are working on ways how to activate the surfaces of the city. They developed methods that are dealing with possibilities and meanings of the vertical urban space, how to interact with it, how to depict it or how to transform it.