anghelos
center on communication studies
arts and architecture
exhibition
Which
spaces for man?
directed by Fabio Alfano
may 5 - 27, 2001, Padiglione Tre navate, Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa
- Palermo
COURSES
LIBRARY
LINKS
FORUM
INTRODUCTION
The time we're living, more than others, sees man involved in the research and acknowledgment of a plurality of dimensions of his "being" (dimensions that are sensorial, emotional, mental, "spiritual", ...) leading him to start a continuous process of integration of his multiplicity in all the fields of life.
This particular condition has, surely, some consequences on the questions about the living space and, therefore, involves and makes the architecture and, in general, the whole art responsible: the spaces to "live" have to reflect, go along with, express new conditions wanted by a man spending his life meeting daily different plans and dimensions of the existence.
The contemporary architectural and artistic research, besides, gives us a wide background of notions, informations, consciousnesses on space and on the forms composing this one, and, so, on its management possibilities at all levels (functional, figurative, technical,...), that request and facilitate the need of definition of new interactive procedures between man and space and of new living hypothesis as well, for instance about the house.
The ways to achieve the conceiving and the production of new spaces and new forms are also changing while they are more and more helping themselves with ways that evidence the pre-eminent role of the concise-intuitive dimension of the project.
From this comes the need to organize some research opportunities in order to elaborate some reflections on these themes and to formulate some possible answers.
The exhibition, therefore, is the result of an (open) research on contemporary living, referred particularly to the house (absolutely a representative place in the contemporaneity), with regard to the changes of the modern society, of man and his new "conscience".
The domestic space, as the protagonist of the exhibition, is analyzed with regard to the sense and the value it has in the present culture and to the relations-interactions it determines in reply to the necessities of a man who recognise himself as a multidimensional entity and in "connection with the whole": the house as an individual microcosm, a recognition and an image of himself, a representation of his own macrocosm.
The exhibition contains some texts and a series of house examples that study and prove the living concept evolution, the themes, the questions, the innovations that the house organism establishes today. The purpose is to recognise in the present history a movement towards a living essence and philosophy marked more and more by new symbolisms, metaphors, poeticity, interactions space-man, wellbeing, meanings, signs, functions giving recognition even to the most intangibles aspects (but not for this reason less present) of man like the necessity to discover and to grow an own "spiritual" dimension, in the terms dictated by our modernity ("extension" of man into the infinity).
Another sequence of "houses" examples, selected in different cultures throughout history, prove how the necessity to relation with something outside man himself, going through the myth, the religion, the esoterism, the cosmology, and so on, has been a continuous need of living and has been expressed in different forms.
The exhibition, besides, presents the projects realized by the students of architecture in the Workshop of the second Seminary of architectural and artistic projects The angel's house on the theme: a real house (the place of living) where to "meet" an ipothetical angel -assumed as one of the modernity symbols - and with him the whole complexity of our present. As a point of view different, out of the ordinary schemes, as a mediator of different realities and dimensions, the communicator of everything resulting intangible according to his nature, the angel synthesizes tensions, necessities, contradictions, certainties and uncertainties of the contemporary man.
Some artists faced the same theme through their expressive ways integrating like this the research with the art point of view.
A collection of video art and some researches realized by firms from this field along with designers complete this panorama.
The exhibition, planned and structured in this way, aims at giving, through its descriptive and also emotional dimension, the legitimacy and the evidence of the theme, the problematic and inclusive character, the multiplicity of the aspects and of the questions involved, the possibility to formulate some significant answers in the different disciplinary fields interested.
Fabio Alfano
© Copyright Anghelos