Quasi Project - Quasi Theory
Installation exposed at the 2018 Unfolding Pavilion, in Venice, during the XVIth architecture Biennale in Venice.
Project designed with Jörg Stanzel & Riccardo Villa
What is Venice? Venice is the place of history. It is the city of Palladio and Canaletto; the city connected with the east. It is the city of architecture: Aldo Rossi, here, tested poetic ideas. So, here, Paolo Portoghesi decided to open an Architecture Biennale. It is the city of the refined architecture of Gino Valle, Carlo Scarpa, Le Corbusier's, Frank Lloyd Wright's and Enric Miralles' failures. Venice is the city of intellectuals such as Manfredo Tafuri and Massimo Cacciari; the radical city.
Yet Venice, is the city of Kitsch and consumerism. The avantgarde hated it. FIlippo Tommaso Marinetti:
"We renounce the Venice of foreigners, market for counterfeiting antiquarians, magnet for snobbery and universal imbecility [...]
Let us burn gondolas, rocking chairs for cretins, and raise to the heavens the imposing geometry of metal bridges and howitzers plumed with smoke."
Can Kitsch become a value?
we answered: yes; it can. What if Venice is, today represented by these kitsch imaginary (like the souvenirs) more than by anything else?
[what we did: we 3d scanned some souvenirs considering them as "cultural objects"]
Still. Is it just that? no. there are other imaginaries and worlds as well. Venice still remains (still, still, still) a cultural city.
[what we did: we mixed the scans of these objects with the 3d reproduction of Valle's building; the building exposed by the exhibition for which this work was conceived; an exhibition about the building, in the building]
the result: a new object. A new souvenir, maybe; or a building. A new composite of parts which carry their own specific meaning and content; yet mixed in a new form and shape.
