22 September 2014
One of the things that surprised me the most during this month as Intern was the fact that every Pavilion is related so much with the country that it is representing in Venice: they seem like little embassies all close to one another. And I noted also that architecture plays a main role not only because it’s the chief character of the Biennale but also because it tells the history and the culture of countries from the outdoor part of the pavilion: the clearest example in my opinion is the Italian Pavilion.
The Italian Pavilion
Located in the northern part of the artwork, once you enter in the Arsenale, you have to walk for more than ten minutes before joining the Italian Pavilion, but when I arrived I was very enthusiastic to see the installation of my country.
The exhibition speaks about the “Grafts” or the Italian ability to pursue new goals and values through a metamorphosis of existing structures: this appears to be the original contribution of the design culture of my country, the creation of “Grafts”, in Italian Innesti, capable to act with efficacy and awareness in layered urban contest.
Visitors can perceive this theme up to the entrance, where there’s a large arched portal in oxidized metal that totally dilates the profile of the existing entrance (maybe a former room for armies).It’s called “ Archimbuto” ( Archifunnel) and the creator of it has said that this nickname attests its ambiguous iconicity and also industrial, monumental, figurative and abstract.
The place of the exhibition is very big and well-composed: there are in fact four wide spaces, their walls made of bricks and stones with high wooden ceilings and in each room there is an artwork with a different topic.
In the first room called “Milan. Laboratory of modernity” are shown Milan’s architectural and urban events of the last hundred years, but also some keys moments of its past history. It looks at some moments of this complex history, where a prideful modern is able to adapt to its contest, to make it his and to transfigure it inside a new urban vision.In the artwork are focused some of the most important monuments of the northern Italian city such as “Piazza del Duomo” (Dome’s square) and its transformation during the last century and a collection of images that shows the modern reconstruction of the city centre of Milan after the bombings during the Second War.
The second room is called “Cut and Paste Environments” and is related to the modern technique of collage that played an important role in moments of Italian architectural restoration:in fact in my country lots of monuments and buildings have been renovated, sometimes with very utopic prefiguration of design proposals.
The last and my opinion the best one, is the room dedicated to a contemporary landscape with all the different conditions of the Italian territory and the different economical, programmatic and social contexts found in the processes of transformation cannot be brought back in any way to a single model.
Looking the pictures on the walls and reading the brochure, I’ve learnt that nowadays the best design culture is animated by a common attitude: the careful observation of the site, of its constraints, of its potentials, and the capacity to intervene on it with an act of transformation able to absorb them into its body and to turn them into a new inhabited landscape.
