Radical Architecture
BASE / Progetti per l’arte presents a series of events dedicated to Radical Architecture, from July 1-22, 2014. It’s the first time it will be presented as a current survey, in person, with members of the radical movement born in Florence in the second half of the 1960s.
JULY 1-22, 2014 Calendar of Events:
Tuesday July 1st | 19,00 | Ufo (Lapo Binazzi)
Thursday July 3rd | 19,00 | Gianni Pettena
Tuesday July 8th | 19,00 | Archizoom (Dario Bartolini, Gilberto Corretti)
Thursday July 10th | 19,00 | Zziggurat | (Alberto Breschi)
Tuesday July 15th | 19,00 | Remo Buti
Thursday July 17th | 19,00 | 9999 (Carlo Caldini)
Tuesday July 22nd | 19,00 | Superstudio (Piero Frassinelli, Adolfo Natalini)
“Emerging from a Florence, immediately after the November 1966 flood, in December of the same year in Pistoia, emerged Archizoom and Superstudio in the exhibition titled “Superarchitettura”. With all the uncertainty, skepticism and a little bit of cynicism, they decided to become “Super”. Freed from the residue and the infatuations of architectural culture represented by the legacy of rationalism, they began the demolition of the discipline through guerrilla actions, Trojan horses, and transgressions. In the same moment, Gianni Pettena and Ufo were also operating inside and outside the University, intending to subvert the foundations of a society monotonous, gray and bourgeois. One way in which they worked was to mix and contaminate the arts, leading to anti-design with its thrill of novelty, which so irritated the Milan designers who called them vulgar. “Our work was indeed a critical job but a job in a particular sort of no man’s land, which was what lay between art and design, between politics and utopia, between philosophy and anthropology. It was an attempt at a radical critique and from that the name of radical architecture, a radical critique of society. ” From these words of Adolfo Natalini, it is possible to capture the full essence characterizing the radical movement in Florence, that even in the wake of the student revolution had grown, as well as Archizoom, Superstudio, Ufo, Pettena, 9999, the Zziggurat and Remo Buti, many of whom had attended a course on “Piper” by Leonardo Savioli.
Among these authors, even if they moved in different, sometimes contradictory, terrain, there was an irreverent irony, cold and sharp towards a society that wanted them on the sidelines. It represented the crisis through the use of utopia in order to bring society into a dimension of reality, criticizing its apparent and misleading image. At the same time, in the same scene of visionary research, we find in England Cedric Price, Peter Cook and Ron Herron of Archigram, in France Yona Friedman, in Vienna Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, Coop Himme(l)blau, Salz der Erde, and a little later in Milan, Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass, Franco Raggi, Ugo La Pietra, Strum in Turin, and in Naples Riccardo Dalisi,…
Their works, now exhibited in the collections of the most celebrated museums in the world, were seen in Italy as a series of goliardic, almost incomprehensible, provocations. Nevertheless they had an immediate international circulation, and many young architects were influenced by these mysterious visionary groups, among them Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas and the Site, and also Eisenman, Foreign Office, Future Systems and many more. Today they are still referenced by younger generations of artists and architects who recognize in them, the role of iconoclast and of the founding of the freedom to draw and design the world as a physicalization of emerging culture.
These seven events at Base / Progetti per l’Arte, each with the presence of some of the protagonists, will present objects and radical documents, actions, performances, storytelling, and subsequent discussions that may arise between the authors and the audience.” (Source: BASE)
A Project by: Base / Progetti per l’arte with Pino Brugellis, Lorenzo Bruni, Giovanni Bartolozzi.
BASE / Progetti per l’arte is an idea of artists for artists. Base is a unique place for art practice in Italy. The activity, begun in 1998, is curated by a collective of artists who live and work in Tuscany, promoting in Florence, some of the most interesting aspects of art today. Base is a dialogue on contemporaneity open to an international discourse. Since its foundation, there have been more than sixty exhibitions including: Sol Lewitt, Marco Bagnoli, Alfredo Pirri, Cesare Pietroiusti, Niele Toroni, Michael Galasso, Jan Vercruysse, Heimo Zobernig, Luca Pancrazzi, Marco Fusinato and John Nixon, Ingo Springenschmid, Paolo Masi & Pier Luigi Tazzi, Antoni Muntadas, Robert Barry, Luca Vitone, Liliana Moro, Claude Closky, Remo Salvadori, Pietro Sanguineti, Liam Gillick, Massimo Bartolini, Mario Airò, Eva Marisaldi, Rainer Ganahl, François Morellet, Bernhard Rüdiger, Nedko Solakov & Slava Nakovska, Olaf Nicolai, Kinkaleri, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matt Mullican, Michel Verjux, Elisabetta Benassi, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Pietro Riparbelli, Simone Berti, Jeppe Hein, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Jonathan Monk, Peter Kogler, Carsten Nicolai, Surasi Kusolwong, Franz West, Tino Sehgal, Nico Dockx, Grazia Toderi, Armin Linke, Davide Bertocchi, Pierre Bismuth, Olivier Mosset, Stefano Arienti, Erwin Wurm, Thomas Bayrle, Diego Perrone and Christian Frosi, Hans Schabus, Maurizio Mochetti, Lawrence Weiner, Amedeo Martegani, Gianni Caravaggio, Piero Golia, David Tremlett, Franco Vaccari who have presented new projects conceived for the space. Currently the Base artist collective is: Mario Airò, Marco Bagnoli, Massimo Bartolini, Vittorio Cavallini, Yuki Ichihashi, Paolo Masi, Massimo Nannucci, Maurizio Nannucci, Paolo Parisi, Remo Salvadori, Enrico Vezzi. Next exhibitions: Rossella Biscotti, Martin Creed, Daniel Buren, Ko Jeong-A, Sam Durant, Mai Thu Perret, Thomas Saraceno, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Christian Jankowski, John Armleder…
The Activity of BASE is promoted and sustained by founding artists / Toscanaincontemporanea 2013 a Project by Regione Toscana / BASExBASE Association.
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