Archive of Spaces

The exhibition at SK Stiftung Kultur shows the huge work the Austrian photographer Margherita Spiluttini did since the 80s, capturing with her camera the essence of architecture.

Archive of Spaces, Margherita Spiluttini, detail
Since the early 1980s, Margherita Spiluttini has been working as a freelance photographer, primarily in her homeland Austria, but also in Switzerland, Italy and Germany.
After many years of collaboration with architects, theorists and artists she has built up an enormous archive of photographic material. She uses her camera to explore buildings as everyday constructs. She captures views of the different interior and exterior spaces of mundane and representational buildings, finished and unfinished structures, neglected and destroyed edifices, roads, brownfields and bridges, urban and natural landscapes from all kinds of different angles.
Margherita Spiluttini
Top: Margherita Spiluttini, Archiv Friedrich Achleitner 01, Wien, A. Foto 2000, detail © Architekturzentrum Wien, Sammlung. Courtesy die Künstlerin und Christine König Galerie 2015. Above: Margherita Spiluttini, Helvetia Patria, St Gallen, CH, Herzog & de Meuron. Foto 1996 © Architekturzentrum Wien, Sammlung. Courtesy die Künstlerin und Christine König Galerie 2015
Her all-encompassing interest in constructed spaces is as evident as the relationship she documents between each structural form and its environment. Rather than present an isolated view, she seeks to capture on camera the essence of architecture as she experiences it, caught between its ideal and utilitarian state.
Margherita Spiluttini
Margherita Spiluttini, Arbeitszimmer von Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky kurz nach ihrem Tod, Wien, A. Foto 2000 © Architekturzentrum Wien, Sammlung. Courtesy die Künstlerin und Christine König Galerie 2015
As a result, Margherita Spiluttini defines the kind of classification criteria she considers necessary to convey and archive the photographs and exhibition work developed over several creative periods. The chronological or scientific-historical aspects play a subordinate role in cataloguing the work. Instead she focuses on the different reception processes and conditions, the performance of various media used to present her images, the impact of the content, as well as formal aspects like the relation between light, colour, material and the object in focus, and the interplay of open-air spaces with the designed object, or in other words, the interplay between reality, composition, designation and meaning.
Margherita Spiluttini
Margherita Spiluttini, Bergisel Sprungschanze 06, Innsbruck, A, Zaha Hadid. Foto 2005 © Architekturzentrum Wien, Sammlung. Courtesy die Künstlerin und Christine König Galerie 2015
The exhibition transfers this multi-layered approach into an individual, installation-based presentation of associations and dialogues that also responds to the building structure of the exhibition room. Architecture as a form of expression, as a mirror of its own time, is once again reflected in this way. Selected large-format colour images of very different objects and landscape views point to structural congruencies in the way things correspond with one another.

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