Alterazioni Video. Incompiuto: the birth of a style
Duration: 29.06 - 22.09.2019
Curator: Christiane Rekade
From 29 June to 22 September 2019 KUNST MERAN MERANO ARTE will be hosting a show by Alterazioni Video, an artistic collective founded in Milan in 2004 by Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, Alberto Caffarelli, Matteo Erenbourg, Andrea Masu and Giacomo Porfiri, which for over ten years has been researching the phenomenon of unfinished public works in Italy.
The exhibition, curated by Christiane Rekade, artistic director of KUNST MERAN MERANO ARTE, is entitled Incompiuto: la nascita di uno stile [Unfinished, the birth of a style]: it tells of the research that over the last decade has been documenting and mapping over 750 buildings scattered throughout the country, works that have never been completed and have therefore had no function, becoming monuments to something that never existed.
For Alterazioni Video, these unfinished works are now the ruins of the contemporary era, the perfect interpretive paradigm to understand the recent history of our country.
Viaducts, hospitals, prisons, housing, theatres, churches, swimming pools and libraries are just some of the categories of unfinished architecture scattered throughout Italy, analytically mapped and classified, giving not only their geographical location but also the degree of incompletion, the year that construction started, their details and size: thus making visible a submerged phenomenon that has in fact completely redefined the appearance of the Italian landscape since the Second World War.
Originating as a digital mapping project, over the years Incompiuto has developed by means of prints, videos and installations, defining an interdisciplinary style that goes beyond architecture. This is for example the case of the recent excursion into the world of fashion, in collaboration with Virgil Abloh, artistic director at Louis Vuitton and founder of the Off-White label: the designer was inspired by the project to produce his men’s collection Off-WhiteTM 2019, and he worked with Alterazioni Video in creating the sets for the show at the Louvre, as well as on a publicity campaign.
The exhibition will tell the story of the Incompiuto, namely its emergence as a true style and the different courses it has taken, ranging from the early works related to this project such as the giant collage Astronave madre [Mothership] (2008), made from sections and elevations of unfinished works in Giarre, in the province of Catania, Sicily; or the video Intervallo (2009), ironically reproducing the model of the eponymous RAI programme, where Italian landscapes and monuments were used as “filler” for empty slots in transmission, up until recent works including sculptures of reinforced concrete; the video Invitation for a dream (2018), which sees the French philosopher Marc Augé discussing the unfinished with the US curator Robert Storr; photographs from the Off-White Lookbook; and unpublished works made specifically for the occasion.
