Be The Poem

The exhibition “Be The Poem. Plastic architecture by Marco Galofaro” marks the first public showing of the architectural models of Marco Galofaro, whose studio realized Alfredo Jaar's resin model for the latest edition of the Venice Biennale.

The models are organized into an organic itinerary that illustrates the complexity of contemporary architectural vision in its constant dialogue with other disciplines.

An artist's talk will be held on the occasion of the exhibition, convened by Domitilla Dardi, with the participation of Matteo Costanzo, co-founder of the architecture studio 2a+p/a, and Marco Petroni, design critic and theorist and Senior Curator of the Plart Foundation in Naples.

The exhibition's title refers to a line spoken by David Carradine at the end of a widely celebrated sequence in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol.1: “If you cannot be the poet, be the poem.” The message is clear: the story trumps heroism, the epic of history is stronger than the single protagonist. This message is in line with the choral conception of architecture that Marco Galofaro brings to his work: that of the construction of plastic scale models, through a process made up of many phases, materials, and procedures, in order to move from the idea of space to its physical realization. 

Why an exhibition of architectural models? Because the model is not merely architecture on a small scale, but a protracted journey, involving many protagonists, where the building represents only the tip of a more extensive collective work. The model, in fact, plays a crucial role in the development of architecture (and not only), inasmuch as it constitutes the first physical concretization of the idea.

Galofaro founded his studio-laboratory Modelab in 2002, working first with Ilaria Benassi and later with other collaborators. Modalab has translated the spatial vision of architects and artists of international renown (Eisenmann, Fuksas, Nouvel, Decq, IaN+, Benassi, Mochetti, Jaar), interpreting it according to the dictates of a thought that is at once physical and conceptual. As in the case of the best interpreters, here the elements that are “found in translation” outnumber those that are lost in the folds of transmittance and transferral.

This interpretive act is flanked by Galofaro's spatial imagination, namely, that of his own fantastic architectures. The latter make it clear that the small scale of the physical matter, like its state of becoming, in no way diminishes the force of the project, but, on the contrary, enhances it. This exhibition of his architectural models – comprising projects made on commission as well as works derived from his own fantastical architectures – gives access to the variety of interpretations of inhabitable space from the privileged perspective of the earliest and foundational phases of creation.

until May, 11 2014
Be The Poem
Architettura plastica di Marco Galofaro
curated by Domitilla Dardi
Fondazione Pastificio Cerere
Via degli Ausoni 7, Roma