BIENNALE VENEZIA

DETAILS

Name: Exhibition “Carlo Scarpa and the origin of things”
Location: Venice, Italy
Year: 2008
Typology: Installation, scientific curatorship, contents on display, layout, catalog and graphics
Surface: 200 sqm
Client: Biennale di Venezia, Regione Veneto

The exhibition layout is a tool for travelling through Carlo Scarpa’s mind, a machine for looking that connects the viewer to the horizon of the exhibition, which is that of origin, the search for meaning, rituals and creation. On a track, ideally without beginning or end, Carlo Scarpa’s drawings can slip, varying the point of view and leaving possible sequences open (“I never finish my work”), but also overlapping, preserving the memory of designing with fabric, for successive layers. The constant slippage between observer and observed places us in an uncertain, indeterminate state, which corresponds to the way Scarpa begins his research: having to give form to his own world, the project becomes a critical procedure, a research, an open structure that reconsiders why things exist.

On the walls, a mental landscape: parts of paintings – which Scarpa knew from having installed them in exhibitions and museums – partially veiled to isolate fragments of landscape, shapes or fields of colour that must have remained in the architect’s eyes and memory.

This is followed by videos dedicated to the four elements linked to the environments and craftsmanship that marked Scarpa’s work: the fire of the Murano glassworks, the water of the Venice lagoon, the gold melting in the crucible and the stone of the Vicenza quarries.