Gabriele Basilico: Scattered City

With Scattered City, Studio Dabbeni is proposing its first one-man exhibition on Gabriele Basilico (Milan, 1944); one of the best-known photographers of international standing, he has spent more than 20 years furthering the debate on the analysis of the city and the contemporary landscape. Basilico says “I see the city as a great breathing body, a growing body undergoing transformation and I want to perceive the signs and observe the form, like a doctor investigating changes in the human body. I am constantly seeking new viewpoints, as if the city were a maze and my eyes were searching for a penetration point.”*

His interest focuses less on the architectural monuments and more on the “average city”, particularly the suburbs where “the quality of the urban environment has been so watered down that it has lost its way.”* The theme of the suburbs is addressed as an open workshop and as work in progress, with the central models of the architectural culture being expressed ad infinitum in an anonymous and differentiated production. The photographs from recent projects were taken between 2001 and 2004 in Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Naples, Barcelona, Santiago di Compostela, Paris, Reggio Calabria, London, Porto, Cherbourg, Beirut and Buffalo.

The exhibition uses sixteen black-and-white photographs – ten large format and six medium ones – and bibliographical records on the artist to present a journey through the cityscape of contemporary urban suburbia. For the exhibition, Studio Dabbeni is publishing a new issue of temporale , comprising, among other things, a Hans Ulrich Obrist interview with Gabriele Basilico plus a written piece by Basilico himself.

In conjunction with the Lugano exhibition, the Milanese publisher Baldini & Castoldi is publishing a new book by Gabriele Basilico, also entitled “Scattered City”.

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Gabriele Basilico: Scattered City