CENTRO PECCI

In collaboration and in connection with

Centro di informazione e documentazione CID/Arti visive

Urban Center, City of Prato

 

 

URBAN TRILOGY / TRILOGIA URBANA presents Radical Architecture films and projects focused on the city by GIANNI PETTENA and the SUPERSTUDIO and UFO groups, selected from the collections and archives of Centro Pecci and offered in parallel to the exhibition L’ARTE E LA CITTÀ / ART AND THE CITY and in conjunction with the opening of the URBAN CENTER at the Centro Pecci in Prato from 20 November 2021.

 

Three short films, together with original projects, publications and archive documents of the anarchitect GIANNI PETTENA and the Florentine radical groups SUPERSTUDIO and UFO, aim to confirm the Centro Pecci’s interest in pioneering and visionary experiences in architecture, from the design of objects to the urban scale, developed between the second half of the Sixties and the early Seventies, now linked to the public activities programme of the new URBAN CENTER.

The exposition, which is open until May 1 2022, highlights a first part of the Radical work collected by Centro Pecci over the last twenty years, which represents a unique legacy in the Italian museum scene, and strengthens the identity of the White Room on the first floor as an immersive space, suitable for historical surveys and current reflections, accompanied by projections, meetings and performances.

 

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GIANNI PETTENA is an independent and original talent who made various urban intrusions in Italy in the late Sixties before confronting the American context, on an experimental level, in the early Seventies, leaving behind the professional standards of an architect to establish himself from then on as an "artist"

 

_The Pig (Italian Carousel), 1967-68. 16 mm film, magnetic sound, 8 min. 25 sec. (archive copy)

_Carabiniers / Unknown Soldier / Grace & Justice, 1968. Photographic series of the trilogy of projects at the Palazzo Comunale in Novara / Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara / VI Festival of Avant-garde Music in Palermo

_Laundry, 1968. Photographic series of the “Urban Field” project, Como

_Wearable Chairs, 1971. Photographic series and assemblage of the project in Minneapolis

On loan from Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Prato

 

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SUPERSTUDIO is a neoavantgarde group in architecture and design, active from 1966 to 1978, which conceived of “an architectural model of continuous urbanisation” as The Continuous Monument (1969-70) and theorised “the use of land by means of grids of services and communications”, anticipating the advent of the Internet in Supersurfaces (1971-72).

 

_The Continuous Monument: New New York, 1969. Numbered offset printing

_Fundamental acts. Education, 1971-72. Original collage

_Supersurfaces, 1971-72. Original collage, project for MoMA in New York

_Supersurfaces / Life, 1972. 35 mm film, magnetic sound, 9 min (archive copy)

On loan from Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Prato

 

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The UFO group represents a “symbol of entrepreneurship”. It was active from 1967 to the end of the Seventies and proposed urban, metaphorical and liberating happenings and developed the concept of Discontinuous Territory to assert proposals for alternative interpretations of living space.

 

_Urboeffimero #6, 1968. 16 mm film, magnetic sound, 3 min. 25 sec. (archive copy)

_Urboeffimero #6, 1968. Black and white photograph, still from the film

_Casa ANAS, 1969-70. Series of colour photographs

_AB (Discontinuous Territory), 1970. Colour photographs

_Project for the University of Florence, 1971. Series of black and white photographs

On loan from Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Prato

 

When: 20 November 2021 - May 1, 2022

On cover: Superstudio, Momento continuo, New York, 1969

 

Thanks to Pecci Filati Spa e Steve Jones Srl for the art bonus.