The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents Utopie Radicali: Florence 1966–1976, an exhibition which brings together the work of 9999, Archizoom, Remo Buti, Gianni Pettena, Superstudio, UFO, and Zzigurat—iconoclastic practitioners who made Florence a focal point for new developments in architectural thought.
The exhibition features all the personalities and groups of the Florentine radical scene for the first time in North America, more than fifty years after the movement began. It examines a moment when visionary groups and figures started a creative revolution and had a profound impact on the development of art at the global scale, through the invention of alternative living space, new models of behaviour, original discourse free of formal and fictional constraints, collective works, design, art, and pop art practices. Archival material drawn from international museums and from the private collections of the movement’s protagonists themselves, including material from the CCA’s Alessandro Poli archive create the opportunity for unexpected encounters and juxtapositions disseminating provocations and oppositions.
Utopie Radicali is curated by Pino Brugellis, Gianni Pettena and Alberto Salvadori, and will be on view from 2 May until 7 October 2018. It is organized by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the Fondazione CR Firenze and the Osservatorio per le Arti Contemporanee.
First presented at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (October 2017– January 2018), Utopie Radicali reveals the complexity that underpinned the cultural scene of the time, with its intense interplay between architecture, art, design, and music, at mass concerts, discotheques, and clubs, including 9999’s Space Electronic in Florence and ’Ufo’s Bamba Issa in Forte dei Marmi. This radical architectural movement resulted from an unprecedented and fruitful interaction between a utopian conceptual dimension of architecture and the visual arts, cinema, theatre, and dance, together with Pop art, conceptual art, arte povera, land art, body art, environmental art, and happenings.
“Today, the spread of ideas that emerged in Italy in the 60s and 70s invites new insights, reactions and interpretations from different cultural contexts that can continue an international exchange and related this historical moment in Italy to contemporary challenges and crises surpassing national borders. In the future and looking backwards, this new dissemination of ideas will once again seem inevitable,” emphasizes CCA Director Mirko Zardini.
The exhibition opened May 1, and runs until October 7. More information is available via the CCA.