An artist has turned the Vele di Scampia into a sonic ghost city

Tracey Snelling’s architectures never stand still. They flash, talk, broadcast music, television fragments, interviews, street noises and vintage films. Architectural models on the outside, small living cities on the inside. “My work is about life,” the US artist, a long-time Berlin resident, tells Domus as we walk through “Invisible Sun,” her exhibition in the Playlist project space at Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio in Milan.

The exhibition, curated by Gabi Scardi and open until June 26, retraces some fundamental stages of her research: from the urban collages of the Clusterfuck series to works on American housing, to the reproduction of a Tokyo club and a döner kebab shop. At the center, however, is one of Europe’s most controversial residential complexes, the Vele di Scampia, observed by Snelling at the exact moment of their eviction.

"When I saw them I thought, what an incredible building," Snelling says, recalling the first time she saw the Sails. Not in Naples but online, through some photographs posted on Facebook by a friend visiting the city.

The encounter with the complex designed by Franz Di Salvo in the early 1970s occurred first as architectural fascination and only later as an immersion in its social and political history. Snelling visited Scampia in 2022, read Roberto Saviano, watched documentaries and reports, but tried to maintain a certain distance from the dominant narrative built around the neighborhood. “I wanted to pay homage to the people who lived there without spectacularizing their condition,” she explains.

Tracey Snelling

It is a difficult balance. For decades, the Vele have been one of the most represented subjects of the Italian urban landscape: a symbol of the failure of Modernism, a permanent film set, a media icon of decay and crime. From the installations presented at the 2025 Venice Biennale to documentaries built on the testimonies of former residents, the Vele continue to be one of the most observed and represented subjects of contemporary Italian architecture. In short, even as they are being demolished, they continue to produce images, whether they want to or not. And capturing them without turning them into a spectacle is one of the most complex things one can do.

For this reason, the model built by Snelling avoids any monumentalization. The illuminated windows show fragments of interviews, empty rooms, daily details, images collected through documentaries and video materials shot in the neighborhood. They are a fragile and chaotic archive of lives and memories that does not express judgment. “I wanted to capture the building at that precise historical moment, which has already passed,” she says.

It is not clear from the photographs, but Snelling’s architectures are extremely noisy and, like giant sound systems, they absorb the acoustic stratification of the city. Playlists coming out of a kebab shop, televisions left on, traffic, conversations and interviews with residents: everything intersects between the windows and the crevices of her models. “The overlapping of sounds is what makes them look like a city,” says Snelling. “It gives you the impression that there is a lot of life,” emphasizing how chaos is a fundamental part of her work. It is sound, in fact, that prevents her sculptures from turning into nostalgic miniatures or, worse, “into adorable dollhouses,” as she says herself.

The title of the exhibition also echoes the Police song Invisible Sun, chosen also to dialogue with Playlist, Giampaolo Abbondio’s project space where every exhibition takes its name from a musical track. For Snelling, however, the reference is not so much about the lyrics of the song as the image evoked by the words: “Invisible Sun suggests the idea of a hope that exists, but that you cannot really see.” Like an invisible sun. Like the hope hidden under the multiple contradictions of places like Scampia. “Scampia is made of many layers,” she says.

Snelling’s interest in architecture, however, was born long before the encounter with the Vele. Raised in the United States in a middle-class context, the artist says she has always been fascinated by how people live and the transformations of cities. “I feel almost like a documentarian, or a sociologist who enters a place and observes,” she explains, specifying however that she never wants to assume the role of absolute authority over the places she passes through.

In the Milanese exhibition, works dedicated to precarious American living also appear, such as the small prefabricated houses and mobile homes widespread in the United States. In works like We Buy Homes for Cash, Snelling addresses the theme of toxic housing and the post-Katrina housing emergency, showing how urban distress does not belong only to the European suburbs. “If you don’t have money, in the United States you often end up living in unsafe or toxic houses,” she says.

Tracey Snelling

A resident of Berlin for years, the artist also works on the city’s Brutalist architectures and large residential complexes, from the Bierpinsel to the Mäusebunker, to the Modernist projects of the former GDR. Among her most recent works is a commission from the Berlinische Galerie dedicated to an enormous social housing complex imagined in the 1960s by the architect Josef Kaiser and never built. For the first time, Snelling confronts not a real building but an architectural utopia that remained on paper. “One could build an entire series of buildings that never existed,” she tells Domus, imagining a possible new direction for her research.

Demolished buildings, failed utopias, marginal neighborhoods, temporary houses and cities that do not exist: Tracey Snelling’s architectures are like lanterns, luminous and noisy dreamcatchers with which she has captured journeys and people. But above all they are architecture because, like the project of a large building, they continue to wonder how one can still live well.

Opening image: Tracey Snelling with the work Vele di Scampia. Courtesy Playlist by Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio