Designed specifically for the spaces of the Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio, the exhibition “What mad pursuit. Aglaia Konrad, Armin Linke, Bas Princen” – promoted by the Academy of Architecture of the Università della Svizzera italiana, curated by Francesco Zanot and open until 22 October 2023 – is an original project that collects the photographic works of three international artists: Aglaia Konrad (Salzburg, 1960), Armin Linke (Milan, 1966) and Bas Princen (Zeeland, 1975).

Inspired by the homonymous essay published in 1988 by the British neuroscientist Francis Crick, the title of the exhibition introduces the theme of combinations and confluences as a fundamental enrichment factor of an entire system. Combining about fifty works, in fact, the exhibition explores the intersections between photography and architecture, represented space and exhibition space, in a plot that puts the works at the center of a constant process of negotiation between subject and exhibition space. Instead of immortalizing, in this exhibition the photograph triggers a chain reaction of re-signification.

The exhibition questions the documentary function of photography, and at the same time contradicts its conception of a two-dimensional image. Images are objects and intertwine a relationship with both the space that they circumscribe – or have circumscribed – with their framing, and with the external one.