Realized in collaboration with Parasite 2.0, Cinema Nervi is a video art project that aims to offer a contemporary and experimental contribution to the exhibition “Pier Luigi Nervi, la Struttura e la Bellezza”, dedicated to the work of the great Italian engineer of the 20th century and set up in the temporary exhibition spaces of Manifattura Tabacchi.
“In the last 30 years we have seen an exponential growth in the use of software and video languages, even applied to architecture, resulting in an unprecedented formal and plastic evolution,” says the collective Parasite 2.0. “Observing Nervi’s work, we have seen how he preceded this evolution already in his time, although he could not experiment in a digital environment, which is nowadays the almost natural habitat of contemporary research. And precisely the digital is the common ground on which moves the architectural research or the artistic investigation of the figures we wanted to involve not only to return a contemporary and futuristic vision of Nervi’s architecture but also to hypothesize new possible scenarios of integration of Nervi’s legacy in the social and cultural fabric of today’s cities.”
For this project, the collective involved five different studios of international architects, designers and artists – Lucia Tahan (Berlin), Clube (São Paulo), The Pleasure Paradox (Milan, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Rotterdam) and Anabel Garcia-Kurland (London) and Alessio Grancini (Los Angeles) – inviting them to reinterpret through video and digital languages, unusual tools for design in Nervi’s period, some of his architectures – respectively the Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin, the Italian Embassy in Brasilia, the G. Berta Stadium and Manifattura Tabacchi. Berta Stadium and Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence, and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
The project will be available online every Tuesday, on NAM - Not a Museum’s Instagram profile and Manifattura Tabacchi’s YouTube channel, starting today, January 19th, with the first work created by Lucia Tahan. The Spanish designer reinterprets the 1959 Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin through two successive and complementary levels: developing and applying an Instagram effect dedicated to the video artwork and the public’s invitation to use and share the filter in further creations.
The peculiarity is that, compared to the usual Instagram effects, Lucia Tahan has created a scale option, so that users can choose to place the structure 1:1, 1:20, 1:50, 1:100. While topology dominates over geometry in augmented reality, the architect wanted to bring architectural concerns of scale and geometry back into spatial computing.
“The platform for distributing this effect is Instagram, which allows people to share the filter and replicate it indefinitely,” adds Lucia Tahan. “The idea is reminiscent of the design of the Palace, a modular repetition that also finds a counterpart in the digital world, where endless replicas are continuously generated and destroyed at an impressive rate.”
Opening video: Lucia Tahan, Palazzo del Lavoro. First work for Cinema Nervi, a video art project curated by Parasite 2.0. and produced by NAM - Not A Museum