Città Ideale: Mechanics/Nature/Eros

Exhibition Dates
The first exhibition was on display April 22 – May 9 2010 in Narni, Italy in the “Tracce” Exhibition during the famous 2-week medieval festival, Corsa all’Anello.

Exhibition Overview
International artists Francesca Sciandra and Brittney Williams are currently developing a series of temporary architectural installations exploring the contemporary idea of metropolis. The built installation is intended for exhibition throughout Europe in the spring and fall of 2010. The exhibition in Narni was the first showing of the work, and provided the artists with an opportunity to display the project as a work in progress to the community.

Philosophical Statement
The project takes it name from the concept of Città Ideale, explored in art and architecture during the Italian Renaissance, with special focus on the iconic painting of the same title currently housed in the Galleria nazionale delle Marche, attributed to Piero della Francesca. We are interested in this image of the ideal city, contrasted with contemporary and radical thought beginning in the 1920′s and 1960′s to today. More specifically, we are exploring the contrast between the “ideal” rational city formed from a large master plan versus the organic “collage” city that rejects the grand utopian vision of total planning and proposes a fabric of interconnecting miniature utopias on the themes of mechanization, nature and eros.

Three Structures: Interconnecting Utopias
The project vision includes three structures, entitled Mechanics, Nature and Eros. The three structures are based on simple geometric shapes: a sphere (representing mechanics), a cone (representing nature), and a cylinder (representing eros). Each structure will allow for combined sensory experience of sound, sight and touch using an assembled collage of material elements and video projection.

The exhibition during the Corsa all’Anello will display conceptual and architectural drawings, models and built prototypes showing the development of the proposed structures.

Exhibition Requirements
The exhibition is best suited for a space with open walls available for hanging and open floor space available for prototypes and models.

Inspirational Quote
The following is a quote from Superstudio, an architecture firm founded in 1966 in Florence, Italy by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. Supertudio was a major part of the radical architecture movement of the late 1960s, and this quote is a creative inspiration for our project:

We’ll keep silence to listen to our bodies.
We’ll watch ourselves living.
The mind will fall back on itself to read its own history.
We’ll play wonderful games of ability and love.
We’ll talk a lot, to ourselves and to everybody.
Life will be the only environmental art.