In 1970, architect Elfried Huth decided to implement one of the first and most daring experiments in participatory social living in Austria, in the Gerlitzgrundhe residential complex, in Graz, offering future residents the possibility of working with him to design their own homes. Through 3D modeling and community decision-making, the façade colors were chosen from the distribution, within limits such as 130 square meters and the size of the gardens. Thanks to public funds and private loans, they made plans for their home: they could become owners.
That utopia put into practice, a project that today is practically unreplicable due to political, economic and social changes, attracts the attention of Austrian photographer Julia Geisbacher (Austria, 1983), who commemorates the history of the project through… My dream house is not a housein which the archival material, combined for the purpose of demonstrating the process, is an audiovisual piece and a series of 40 images made by the artist. Designed from a neutral point of view, supported by a strong interest in formal elements, they reflect the community and each of its inhabitants. The mayor still lives there: maintaining their community spirit and personal connections, and fifty years later, this radical vision remains in effect. Los vecinos identifies itself with the neighborhood and continues to be downright cool.
The exhibition is part of the activities of the seventh session of Photos/Industrywhich through 11 exhibitions distributed in different places in the historic center of Bologna focuses on the concept of the house, understood as a physical construction and a cultural symbol; A dynamic space that combines memory and intimacy, highlighting the processes of transformation that impact human experiences.
The Biennale, curated by Francesco Zanot, brings together the opinions of artists from different generations and origins, because photography is still far from being a record, but rather becomes a tool for interpretation, questioning and inhabiting the spaces that shape us and enable us to discover the invisible structures of everyday life. How does Mikael Olsson (Sweden, 1969) do it? Sudracol Frusacol. The series asks how we understand and represent the architecture of the most emblematic homes of the modernist architect and designer Bruno Matheson. Under the gaze of the Swedish photographer, architectural representation leaves behind clarity and distance to adopt a more abstract and subjective tone, affecting presence and absence. His images conjure scenes characterized by memory, emptiness, degradation and fragility. Olson records on the ground the architecture: he reveals the fleeting condition of those who live in it.
In Afrikaans, this term com. pophuis It alludes to a common type of Monica’s house rooted in South African culture, and is linked to a common children’s game in marginal neighborhoods where children recreate domestic spaces with improvised materials, generating alternative worlds. In your series popboys, Vuyo Mabhika (South Africa, 1999) uses this playful universe to reconstruct domestic scenes using cut-outs of himself as he returns to a childhood without his father present and marked by constant displacement. Collages Composed of vivid colors where autobiography and imagination, the private and the collective, intertwine, as happens in… ladybot (2004) is one of the works that constitute Fourth housethe retrospective dedicated to Moira Ricci (Italy, 1977). On Local security (2003-04) The photographer documents A performance Centered around a one cubic meter box in which the house where he spent his childhood is reproduced, it can be seen through the window by various visitors who appear reproduced in a video like intrusive giants. The photographer invites us to rethink our world and reveals how the intimate world can become an expanded scenario where shared fears, desires and memories are encountered; A symbolic area where we can look again and better understand the things that have built us as individuals and that sometimes overtake us.
Family stories are also the basis of Kelly O’Brien’s work (UK, 1985). There is no rest for the wickedwhere the silent devotion of women devoted to domestic work is venerated. The exhibition, curated by Raquel Villar Pérez, combines the British photographer’s painful and reflexive approach with documentary transplants and more conceptual ones, revealing the tensions and sacrifices of the daily lives of three generations of women. Characterized by low-value and poorly paid jobs, constantly struggling with economic insecurity, these women live in the paradox of their home: a refuge that should protect them, but also a theater of constant labor, where there is no physical or emotional comfort.
In the Visani Palace, a compact network of pictures hangs from an architectural structure, occupying several rooms. A novel of the suburban phenomenon that transformed the city of Monterrey, Mexico, through the eyes of Alejandro Cartagena (Mexico, 1977). The images are in dialogue with twentieth-century American propaganda about villa ownership as a guarantee of well-being and stability, generating an interesting tension with the way in which Mexico has, in recent decades, reshaped this idea, giving way to disjointed remote enclaves and an imbalance with the surrounding nature, the result of growth designed for profit, not community. This Mexican photographer’s work will arrive at Fundación Mapfre next year.
If the work of Ursula Schulz Dornburg (Germany, 1938) is presented as a mapping of houses built in different countries and shaped by the surroundings and the culture of the surrounding areas, I am looking for Palestinea project presented by the British Forensic Architecture collective, reconstructs and depicts the disappearance of Palestinian villages since 1948. The Prut River, the natural border between Romania and Moldova, Mattei Pegnaro (Romania, 1966) serves as a reference for investigating the changes that rural life experienced as the humanist gaze of Sesto Sisti (Italy, 1906-1981) unfolds day by day. In Pueblo Industrial.
The latest edition of FOTO/INDUSTRIA asserts itself as an international reference for photography, supported by Live, work and survive Written by Jeff Wall, sponsored by Urs Stahel at Fundación MAST headquarters. Distinctive light boxes coupled with large-scale photographs introduce visitors to everyday themes full of mysteries. “Moments of social truth obtained thanks to the tools of poetry,” warns the photographer, remembering that photography on the ground records life: it illuminates it, builds it and transforms it into a poetic account of our struggles, our aspirations and our shared worlds.
Image/Industry. Mast Foundation. Bologna, Italy. Until December 14th.