Superstudio Migrazioni

Spanning architecture, design, art and anthropology, Superstudio’s work remains intriguingly contemporary. At first "super" and fundamentally realistic, and adopting consumption and production mechanisms in an ironic and critical manner, Superstudio’s architecture evolved to encompass "things, the body, the Earth," before dissolving all materiality, retaining only a symbolic dimension and blending with life itself.

Begun in 1966, Superstudio’s adventure led its members to speculate, for more than a decade, on the ways in which to inhabit the world as transformed by capitalist forces and technological evolutions. This is what the exhibition explores through the prism of "migrations" (migrazioni). Borrowed from Superstudio’s vocabulary, this notion serves as a conceptual and poetic key to dive into the group’s architecture, which its members understood as an activity of "production, elaboration and continuous transmission of ideas."

The exhibition proposes a thematic and chronological journey through what is still one of the most radical and original bodies of work of the 20th-century architectural production. Crossing traditional disciplinary categories and geographic borders, Superstudio’s projects have travelled in the globalized world they depicted, from Florence to Tokyo. The group’s critical and excessive visions circulated widely and were at the heart of the dialogues Superstudio developed with some of the protagonists of the architectural scene in the second half of the 20th century. Alongside the group’s oeuvre, the exhibition will present the work of 9999, Archizoom, Hiromi Fujii, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Ugo La Pietra, Leonardo Ricci, Aldo Rossi, Leonardo Savioli, Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Bernard Tschumi.

Superstudio Migrazioni features the group’s inventive and elegantly crafted works (photocollages, drawings, installations, models and films) alongside industrial design objects and furniture, revealing the wide range of the group’s projects. The exhibition benefits from the exceptional loan of the original works from the Centre Pompidou collection and from Superstudio’s archives.

Online Opening with Gian Piero Frassinelli, Bernard Tschumi, Beatrice Lampariello, Gabriele Mastrigli a.o., Thursday January 14 , 7-8:30pm

Book
More than an exhibition catalogue, Superstudio Migrazioni proposes three parallel yet complementary explorations—through texts, images and archives—of the collective journey that pushed architecture to its limits. The first book gathers essays by scholars and interviews with Hiromi Fujii, Rem Koolhaas, and Bernard Tschumi who were in close contact with Superstudio. The second book proposes a thematic voyage through the work: a rich iconography is presented through a series of notions taken from Superstudio’s vocabulary, revealing—beyond the unified history incarnated in a few iconic photo-collages—the richness of the projects and images produced throughout the group’s active years. The last book presents previously unpublished letters from the archives of Adolfo Natalini. The exchanges between the members of Superstudio and the letters written to leading architectural figures of the second half of the 20th century, paint a collective autobiography in which, through fragments, architecture and life are seen to coincide more and more. Superstudio Migrazioni, Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou (ed.), CIVA and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2020, ISBN 978-3-96098-888-5. Available at CIVA e-shop

Curator: Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, in dialogue with Cédric Libert
Chairman: Yves Goldstein
General Directors: Benjamin Erarts, Pieter Van Damme
Artistic Director: Nikolaus Hirsch

Press inquiries: Dieter Vanthournout
d.vanthournout [​at​] civa.brussels, T +32 (0) 497 90 12 51

Project supported by the Italian Council (7th Edition, 2019) program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism