REBECCA AGNES - dys-functional cities

On December 11, 2014, Davide Gallo gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition of the artist Rebecca Agnes, entitled “dys-functional cities”. Always been sensitive to the metropolitan aspect of existence, in this latest project Agnes faces the issue of dichotomy, within the urban space, among the limits and restrictions that architecture often hides behind the guise of an impeccable formal aspect, and the utopia that it tries to resolve through audacious urban experimentations. The project includes a series of drawings and two embroideries.

The drawings in which the artist uses a personal data, refer to cities and real places, they are a travel notebook just as nineteenth-century travelers used to have. The drawings report the deceit of metropolitan beauty that actually hides restrictions and closures. There are limits that can remain hidden to those who do not have a direct experience of them, their obviousness can elude custom or hide behind beauty. The processes taking place in the cities are an expression of how our society is structured. The drawings are a criticism to the organization of the city space that often does not take into consideration the real needs of the citizens, but tries to homologate individuals to a standard, excluding those that are dissimilar or alternative to a traditional social order.

The embroideries, which act as counterpoint to the drawings, are thoughts about alternative approaches to habitability.

The first embroidery is entitled "Phalanstère, Familistère, unité d'habitation/ Phalanstery, Familistery, housing unit". This work is a brief historical excursus, which starts from the first proposals for utopic urbanism to get to modernism, and to urban complexes made in recent years. The embroidery represents a landscape from which emerge three architectures connected by a road-trail. The first is the “Phalanstery” of Charles Fourier (1822), residential facility in which the life of members of the base social unit named "Phalanx" takes place. The Phalanstery is actually the project of a real city, a unit thought for 1620 inhabitants that develops in a series of buildings connected with each other to create one regular building. It is a self-sufficient city that produces and works collectively. Pursuing this path we have a project carried out between 1856 and 1859 by Jean-Baptiste André Godin: Familistère. Godin starts from Fourier theories. His intention was to improve the living conditions of workers, but also "of production, trade, supply, education and recreation", all facets of the life of a modern worker. In Godin the relationship man-production is the center of his urbanistic utopia. At the end of the path we have the façade of one of the Unité d'Habitation of Le Coubousier (1947). A sort of city within a city. Designed as a true "vertical city" characterized by individual spaces included in a broader context of common areas. These architectures, hide a fallacious aspect, in the impossibility to create the "perfect" place, but reveal however, the attempt to make the space a social problem, so that these utopias remain fundamental experiences from which to develop new strategies

The second embroidery is entitled "La Carta di Atene e le 4 funzioni umane / The Athens Charter and the 4 human functions". In the Athens Charter of 1938 the basic principles of the contemporary city are specified; it is a fundamental document of the Modern Movement and of its vision of town planning. Among the various points emerge 4 human functions: to live, work, play and move. These four basic functions are shown at the 4 corners of the tapestry: start boxes to begin the game of the goose that the embroidery reproduces. A game in which there is no winner or end, because the boxes are connected to each other seamlessly. On the boxes there are here and there, details of buildings and notes.

Of course, the following questions remain open: which citizens these projects are aimed to? What can be the lowest common denominator between individuals and their needs? In what way the dwell can remain an open (fluid) process rather than restriction and order imposed from above?

Both the drawings and the tapestries reveal some rules. On the one hand the beauty of the drawings hide the restrictions that we encounter on a daily basis, on the other hand, the "good" intentions of "social" urbanity that exemplify in the modular architectures on the first embroidery and in the "Athens Charter" of the second.