Fondazione Antonio Ratti

Yona Friedman

Public Improvisations

Artists' Research Laboratory (XIV CSAV)
1–23 August 2008

"Art can be considered as one of the expressions of the individual related to a community. Art is always addressed to somebody. A work of art carries a message, but does not include the codes with the help of which the message could be understood. The message can be also for the artist exclusively. Everybody has something to send as a message. Thus everybody is a potential artist. There is no object that cannot be looked on as an artwork. We have to facilitate for everybody who feels the need to become an artist, to find a code technically simple to use for his/her message. Such codes have the characteristic to be improvised. Art begins with improvisation, intelligence too. In the Public Improvisations seminar we will explore improvisation, simple techniques, not needing complicated instructions or drawings, plans. For being accessible to a general public, art has to employ simple techniques, easy to implement. Improvised public art can be explored anywhere in public spaces: in streets, in woods, in a hall, on a lake. The site itself is part of the work of art."
(Yona Friedman)

Director
Annie Ratti
Curators
Luca Cerizza
Anna Daneri
Cesare Pietroiusti
Coordinators
Anna Daneri
Caterina Riva

Invited artist

Yona Friedman (b. 1923, Budapest – 2020, LA) was an architect, theoretician, essayist and artist. After escaping the Nazi roundups in World War II, Friedman lived for about a decade in Haifa, and then moved to Paris in 1957. He was trained as an architect and rose to prominence with his manifesto L’architecture Mobile (1958) and his idea for a different approach to urban growth with the Ville Spatiale from 1956. He upholds an architecture capable of including the ongoing transformations of society. Social mobility implies infrastructures, housings an urbanistic solutions that can be modified and recreated according to the needs of people and of the inhabitants. Friedman, and his theory of the bridge-city, have been key to the visionary and utopian phase of megastructure architecture in the Sixties. For the United Nations and UNESCO, he has produced a number of self-organizing architecture manuals distributed in Africa, South America and India.

Friedman's works have been presented in several international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta 11, and belong to collections of some of the most important international museums. Among his works is the project for the Contemporary and Modern Art Museum of Rovereto (2006), a reflection on the use of architecture in contemporary society.

Participant artists

Knowless Eddy Knowless
BridA
Einat Amir
Elena Bajo
Elia Cantori
Ludovica Carbotta
Davide Cascio
Oppy De Bernardo
Giovanni De Lazzari
Andrea Dojmi
Mark Durkan
Audrey Lam
Marco Lampis
Gabriel Martinez
Margherita Moscardini
Marlie Mul
Massimiliano Nazzi
Treasa O'Brien
Alessandro Quaranta
Linda Quinlan
Therese Sunngren
Ciro Vitale
George Wuarburton

Exhibitions

Yona Friedman

Musée dans la rue

EXHIBITION
22 July–17 August 2008

Corso Aperto

EXHIBITION
22 July 2008

Public Improvisations

EXHIBITION
4 December–1 March 2008

Publications

Yona Friedman

Public Improvisation

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