Tomaso De Luca: A Week’s Notice

A Week’s Notice by Tomaso De Luca is a three-channel video and sound installation in which miniature models of houses borrowed from the cinema, history of architecture and the artist’s private life, are seeing flying and collapsing before the viewer’s eyes. It is an ode to the disintegration of architecture that seeks beauty in instability and turns trauma into a new territory of creation and rebirth.

The work draws its theme from the process of gentrification that came on the heels of the AIDS crisis which claimed its victims in the 1980s and 1990s. In those decades, affected by the epidemic and the countless deaths it generated, the homosexual community disappeared from the neighborhoods of big cities. The real estate business saw an economic opportunity in the massacre: lots of apartments were abruptly emptied of furniture and personal belongings and put back on the market for a new generation of healthier and wealthier tenants. In an attempt to illustrate the feeling of dread that ruled over the gay community at the time, but also regain that lost space, De Luca’s installation transforms domestic architecture into a disorienting scenario, where precariousness and the sense of loss are turned into generative elements of reconstruction. In the artist’s words, A Week’s Notice is an antidote to monumentality and stillness, an odd, joyful response even in the face of the Apocalypse that the LGBTQ+ community has known for a very long time. 

Tomaso De Luca is primarily a sculptor, yet he works also with techniques that unleash a political discourse revolving around the concepts of body, history, landscape and space. 

All of De Luca’s works originate from a spirit of survival: making do becomes an agile and revolutionary way of thinking that dictates the choice of materials, forms, media. Abandoning the vertical thought system of reason, De Luca’s practice favours anti-logic and the unexplored fissures of language and space, it opens the way to empathy and the role that emotions plays in defining life and decision making. Tomaso De Luca thus articulates personal and intimate topics into a wider context, such as the reflection on gender differences and minorities from which he extrapolates broadly universal themes. 

Tomaso de Luca was born in 1988 in Verona. He lives and works in Berlin. A Week’s Notice won the 2020 Maxxi Bvlgari Prize. 

The exhibition is curated by Luigi Fassi and Anni Venäläinen.