Exhibition Details

A survey on the experiences of Radical Architecture and comparisons with contemporary art in connection with the Information and Documentation Center CID / Visual Arts, Archivio Lara-Vinca Masini Urban Center, City of Prato. The exhibition SPAZIO RADICALE / RADICAL SPACE continues and deepens the survey on the experiences of Radical Architecture collected at the Pecci Center in Prato, starting with the concise presentation of TRILOGIA URBANA dedicated to films, original projects and archival documents by the architect Gianni Pettena and of the Florentine groups Superstudio and UFO.
The new exhibition proposes various projects from 18 December 2021 to 30 April 2022, also including works from the museum collection, together with materials from the CID / Visual Arts and in particular from the Lara-Vinca Masini Archive, to broaden the context of "radical" research between the second half of the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century and offer unprecedented comparisons between experimental architecture and contemporary art. The SPAZIO RADICALE exhibition is conceived as a new opportunity to enhance the heritage of research into images, objects and ideas that make up the various collections and are now found in the archives of the Pecci Center. The itinerary presents, in an articulated way and rich in suggestions, the explorations of the "space" proposed by "radical" architects and contemporary artists: the space imagined, conceived and that taken from life; the possible place and its opposite, the improbable; the shared context, lived or the contested, fought one; analytical exploration and metaphorical transfiguration.
Chronologically, the exhibition opens with the work Esse by the visual poet Luigi Tola which linguistically anticipates the Superarchitecture by Archizoom and Superstudio, a germinal event of Florentine Radical Architecture (in December 1966, just after the flood of Florence); then with Gilberto Corretti's project for a cultural center in the Cascine di Prato, which appears today as a prelude to Italo Gamberini's architectural project for the Pecci Center; followed by the seductive habitats and the Dressing Design of Archizoom, the "pop icons" of the Superonda sofa and the Sanremo lamp produced by Archizoom themselves for Poltronova.
From the second half of the 1960s, Ettore Sottsass and Gianni Pettena subvert the roles of the designer and architect: Sottsass, like the UFO group, invents "metaphors" on the relationship between "body, landscape, environment" , to which the Neil Jenny's anti-illusion painting, Andrey Kuzkin's ritual photo-performance, Karin Arink's recent tattered sculpture; Pettena rethinks concepts such as "identity, nature" which are linked on the one hand to Luigi Tola's Visual Poetry and Valie Export's act of self-determination and, on the other, to Stephen Shore's photography on the road . The openings on "other spaces"they lead to the forerunner "cut" on canvas by Lucio Fontana (essential for any research on the concept of space), to the voids implied by Mario Mariotti, to the unsettling actuality of the image of Paolo Canevari.
In the Global Tools [Global tools], around the magazine "Casabella" directed in the early seventies by Alessandro Mendini, an entire group of architects and designers interested in investigating the "extra-urban material culture" as some members of Superstudio do, or denouncing "the architecture of bureaucracy" as UFOs do, rather than retracing the iconography of the Radicals as happens in the table set by Remo Buti. Superstudio's reflected architecture hybridizes architecture with nature and anticipates the Supersuperficiewhere "an alternative model of life" is envisaged by means of the network of services and communications. Subsequently Vito Acconci experiences the encounter between physical body and architectural body and Michelangelo Pistoletto develops the experience of the "mirror painting" also in object form. The exhibition is concluded by the reticular and modular abstraction of the Histograms of architecture and the intense nucleus of images of Superstudio-backstage 1966-1978 interpreted by Cristiano Toraldo di Francia as a personal gaze, an a posteriori work on the work of the group of which was one of the protagonists.
Along the exhibition path of SPAZIO RADICALE there are references to specific exhibitions or interventions, such as the two stages of the Superarchitecture exhibition at the Galleria Jolly 2 in Pistoia (1966) and at the Galleria Civica di Modena (1967), the personal exhibitions of Ettore Sottsass at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa and at the Sperone Gallery in Milan (1967), the Archizoom exhibition at the Mana Art Market in Rome (1968), the Dance Festival and the Robert Smithson intervention organized by the L'Attico Gallery in Rome (1969), the historic exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape at the MoMA in New York (1972, on the occasion of which the art critic Germano Celant coined the phrase Architettura Radicale), the Superstudio retrospective at the Galleria Schema in Florence (1972) and the famous multidisciplinary Contemporary exhibition in the parking lot of Villa Borghese in Rome (1973-1974, directed by Achille Bonito Oliva with an architecture section curated by Alessandro Mendini), the Venice Biennale (1978, edition in which Lara-Vinca Masini invited the Radicals).
From start to finish, like an exhibition within an exhibition, the significant presence of the Superstudio-backstage 1966-1978 by Cristiano Toraldo di Francia and documents from the CID / Arti Visive, in particular from the archive of Lara-Vinca Masini which dei Radicali has been a careful observer and supporter: these materials are the visual and interpretative keys that dot the "radical" galaxy, of which the Centro Pecci in Prato is today the custodian.
RADICAL SPACE
Radical architecture and contemporary art in the collections of the Pecci Center
in connection with
CID Information and Documentation Center / Visual Arts, Lara-Vinca Masini Archive
Urban Center, City of Prato
"Radical" artists and architects on display:
Vito Acconci, Karin Arink, Archizoom Associati, Andrea Branzi, Remo Buti, Paolo Canevari, Gilberto Corretti, VALIE EXPORT, Lucio Fontana, Neil Jenny, Andrey Kuzkin, Mario Mariotti, Alessandro Mendini, Gianni Pettena, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Stephen Shore, Ettore Sottsass jr, Superstudio, Luigi Tola, Cristiano Toraldo of France, UFO