PREMIÈRE: AGLAIA KONRAD - LA SCALA

Première: Sunday April 24th 2016 // 18:15 (screened in loop)

Descending from the modernist architectural movement of the early 20th century, Brutalism is an international movement that flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. Often related to governmental and social buildings such schools or high-rise housings, the typical brutalist architecture is rather a massive, fortress-like, construction with a predominance of exposed concrete construction.

In Italy, Vittorio Viganò (1919-1996) is probably the main exponent of brutal architecture. He undertook in 1956 a residential project for the sculptor and architect André Bloc (1896-1966) who is best known to be the founder of the magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Among the best architectures by Viganò, La scala is a rather small house on a spectacular headland overlooking Lake Garda. It consists of two horizontal concrete planes in which the rooms are shaped by glass separators and it is characterized by a long stairway that connects the house to the banks of the lake.

Over the years – and soon on view in the exhibition From A to K that takes place at M - Museum in Leuven – the Brussels-based artist Aglaia Konrad brought together an enormous archive of images shot in such diverse cities as Sao Paulo, Beijing, Chicago, Dakar, Tokyo, Cairo or Shanghai. In her new film, Aglaia Konrad combines in a split-screen different views of the villa and its surroundings. Her work should be considered as a form of visual research. Konrad establishes a dialectic between the house's interior and the lake's vista, but also between the brutalist style of the house and the enclosing nature. In this way, Konrad succeeds at the same time to document and to provide the viewers with a bodily perception of the Viganò's oeuvre.

Aglaia Konrad - La Scala
2016, split-screen, 11'40", color, silent.

This event is part of Heritage Day 2016: Rituals