Remembering San Siro: the Domus stadium party many still talk about

From non-place to piazza, from eyes-on-the-ball to gazes crossing and meeting: twenty years ago, in the spring of 2005, during Milan Design Week, it all happened at San Siro, thanks to Domus under the direction of Stefano Boeri. It feels like centuries away now, in a present where the demolition of Milan’s historic stadium seems increasingly likely. But that one-night event was a vast celebration, turning San Siro into a mega-situationist device where, quite literally, everything happened, and everyone came. Yona Friedman’s city models were soon used in a playful polystyrene battle; Marcello Maloberti led a live procession of monobloc chairs; there were concerts, sets, exhibitions, installations everywhere – Armin Linke on tourism, Matthew Barney with Arto Lindsay – Alejandro Jodorowsky read the tarot, and a picnic in honor of Pierre Restany gathered Enzo Mari, Lea Vergine, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Piero Gilardi, Gabriele Basilico, Tino Sehgal, Michele De Lucchi, and many more. It was conceived to meet, as Domus wrote at the time, “curiosity and need for socialization(that) are not always adequately met”, and to encourage “being braver”. After imagining and realizing it, Domus recounted the great San Siro celebration in issue 881, May 2005.

Marco Belpoliti

On Thursday, April 14th 2005, Milan's largest courtyard was opened to the public: the San Siro Stadium. 

On Thursday, April 14th 2005, Milan's largest courtyard was opened to the public: the San Siro Stadium. Over 35,000 visitors (mostly young and very young) entered the temple of soccer. watched video projections and films, listened to discussions between art critics, attended book presentations and enjoyed musical performances. The experiment organised by Domus worked: the stadium went from being a black hole (as defined by Yona Friedman) to a place of encounter. exchange, meeting and talking, instead of just shouting - for one night, that is.

The stadium is a place where concentration is focused, multiplying energy through the training of all eyes on a sphere of leather: thousands and thousands of them fixed on a single darting point. In a stadium, people are in unison, fused into a single body, or in two bodies that are opponents only in theory: the supporters. In a piazza, people's gazes cross paths - there is an exchange. These are two opposite and complementary opportunities in opening up San Siro for cultural events. It means opening it to all kinds of interaction that caters for the wide and unexpected range of tastes and approaches of the people that made the effort to come all the way out there, and this has a special meaning in today's world. There were no rock stars to go crazy over, no exceptional occurrences being celebrated; we weren't in Rome or in Mecca. 

There were no rock stars to go crazy over, no exceptional occurrences being celebrated; we weren't in Rome or in Mecca. Yet the city of Milan and its temporary Furniture-Fair guests responded overwhelmingly. What does that mean? It means that culturally speaking, there is not only television and screen entertainment that counts; it means that young people's curiosity and need for socialisation are not always adequately met; it means that we need to be braver. The holiness of San Siro, temple of Soccer, was desacralised - not by transgression, but by inclusion. This is a sign that we need to do this more often and think of other similar ways to make the worlds of fashion, design, graphics and publishing congregate with the one-hundred schools and many universities in new and exciting ways. This is the message that comes over loud and clear from Thursday night's event, a decidedly democratic happening: the democracy of gazes.

Andrea Lissoni

Circular began as an experiment. Interpreting Milan's symbolic San Siro stadium as a multidisciplinary space raises some questions: can a large sports arena be transformed into a square, or even a city? Are different uses possible for a place with so many connotations in its rhythms and form, in its logics so articulated through media, business and ritual?

The expositive programme of Circular was conceived as a score: open, multiple, palimpsest-like. Conscious of tackling the unstable art/entertainment frame, it was even coercive towards the artists called to occupy unusual spaces to be highlighted, thrown open to interpretation arad inhabited. The invited participants came from disparate generations and geographical and disciplinary origins. During Circular, their works drew incongruous plots, emotional maps and unexpected feedback.

The Furniture Fair is a densely packed moment for Milan, marked by precise and largely guided rhythms, choices and movements. But the stadium was presented as a strange attractor, a colossus of energies in tension between two suspensions, two anticipations. Firstly a temporal suspension: a reference to the behaviour, possibly idleness, to the observation of bodies and forms, to the happy, personal and collective use of empty and full spaces, to the events and their absence.

Secondly a spatial suspension, an invitation to explore, to circulate freely, even to join a treasure hunt, relying on the simplest and most human of resources: the eyes, asking for information, word-of-mouth, tom-toms. The form of the city steadily took shape in the night. The crowd dissipated and there was the creation of spontaneous situations, street life, attitudes, games, expressive releases, tensions and fears. Small and original events have perhaps written a new page in the stadium's biography, but they have showed us a sure working perspective for next year's appointment.

Marcello Maloberti
Via Col di Lana 8, 2005 (performance). Six performers-with plastic chairs hoisted on their shoulders and transformed into sculptures-started by streetcar from Porta Genova station, crossed the stadium and then installed themselves on the steps of the north curve of the first ring. 

Yona Friedman
La ville spatiale, 2005 (installation). The balustrades of the ramps to the second ring of the stadium and the entrance to the executive hall housed pieces of the city in Styrofoam and cardboard. The installation turned into a devastating styrofoam battle at midnight. 

Matthew Barney
De Lama Lamina, 2004 (35mm film). The film was screened in a large hall in the orange subtribune that had been converted into a cinema. The subject of the film is the affair--among local traditions, worship of orixhas and Barney's imaginary visioanrio--through the parade float captained by Arto Lindsay for the 2004 carnival in Salvador de Bahia. 

Armin Linke/Piero Zanini
Alps - Notes for a film in progress, 2004 (video installation). The three-screen installation shows the alienating artificial, technological and touristic grafts that reshape the contemporary imagery of the Alpine landscape. 

Alejandro Jodorowsky/Marianne Costa
Tarot reading and poetry reading. After a reading by Marianne Costa and the distribution of books printed especially for the occasion, Jodorowsky lingered until 10:30 p.m. with the audience. 

Jimmie Durham
Smashing, video by Maria Thereza Alves, 2004 (video installation). The video--Jimmie Durham himself sitting at a table smashing one after another all the objects that are brought to him as they are brought to him--was projected in a room for storage use in Tower 8. 

Arto Lindsay, Arto Lindsay&Carnaval band
2005 (concert). Related to Matthew Barney's film (as if it had literally spilled out of it), the show transformed the VIP grandstand terrace into an outdoor concert until 1 a.m. 

Picnic
Homage to Pierre Restany; San Siro without barriers; Enzo Mari: a question answers; Conversation on public space; With H. U. Obrist, E. Mari, G. Basilico, M. Belpoliti, M. De Lucchi, P. DiBello, A.
Garutti, M. Guixé, J. Irvine, M. Moratti, L. Ponti, T. Sehgal, S. Gabusi, P. Binda, N. Bourriaud, S. Casciani, P. Gilardi, M. G. Mazzocchi, A. Mendini, L. Vergine, A. Di Rosa, A. Cefaliello, A. M. Moratti, A. Brandirali, P. Zoppini, S. Vilucchi, F. Frates, P. Barletta, J. Foot, M. Arcidiacono (+ shoggoth, invernomuto).