curators: Darko Fritz and Sonja Leboš
On Tuesday, July 3, 2018. at 7 pm the exhibition
Ugo La Pietra :: Disequilibrated Systems is going to open at Oris House of Architecture in Zagreb. This exhibition is the first module in shaping a large international exhibition about the
International Meetings in Vela Luka 1968-1972 that is going to be presented in detail in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka in 2021, after a multiannual preparations conducted by grey) (area.
International Meetings took place in 1968, 1970, and 1972. in Vela Luka with contribution of important domestic and international names. Meetings commenced as a summer artists' colony to work in the traditional system of mosaics, while in the following editions interdisciplinary syntheses of various art disciplines, urban planning, architecture and finally multimedia approach that included mass media were carried out. In 1970 the construction of tourist settlement Plitvine was planned, and the author of the urban design was Ricardo Porro. One of the contributors was Ugo la Pietra, whose work on that theme is going to be presented for the first time at all.
The international importance of the institution of La Pietra's interdisciplinary work is uncontestable. As the initiator of numerous research and artistic groups (Gruppo del Cenobio, Gruppo La Lepre Lunare, Gruppo Design Radicale, Global Tools, Cooperativa Maroncelli, Fabbrica di Comunicazione, Libero Laboratorio), La Pietra has established his work in crossing the boundaries between architectonic, design and artistic practice.
The most important for our context is his work from 1967 when he initiated the theory of disequilibrated systems, and transformed that theory in the series of works and actions of radical design in urban environment; the research of urban peripheries that he initiated with L. Marzoto in 1968 which explicitly referred to strategies of reappropriation of urban ambiance by the users, citizens respectively; most importantly his contribution within the frame of the International Artists Meetings in Vela Luka in 1970 and proposals for the interventions in the landscape of the island of Korčula.
La Pietra speaks of his work in the following manner: “The '
objectual' reality has to be sought by analyzing a social and environmental situation in which alienated objects and persons interact in a form of mutual exploitation. The loss of reality of the objects corresponds to the moment in which they overcome their elementary message, becoming bearers of structural reality that can no longer be explained by a plain relation between labor force, purchase-power and value of use.”
La Pietra's need to “deliver to society not so much an object but a method” based on the theory that he named “Disequilibrated Systems” and which allows to individuals and communities to spot and appropriate “degrees of freedom” in order to “live” and not just “use” the city, is visible from his untiring mobilization of different journals and magazines, as well as from incessant research, problematizing relations between the center and periphery and from series of works that tackle reappropriation of the city by its citizens.
Possible interventions at the coast nearby Vela Luka, where he collaborated on the Plitvine tourist settlement plan, La Pietra also describes as a
disequilibrated intervention. He thought that the fundamental desire of an urban man in a tourist settlement was to find space for collective creation, and he recognized the needs of a tourist for privacy, service, freedom, creativity and communication. His project proposed a spatial model for transforming the Dalmatian littoral landscape. The proposal included a radical land-art intervention of cutting the top of a nearby islet, which is very similar to the project by Ivan Kožarić, who cut the top of a mountain but from another conceptual perspective.
La Pietra's films are another form of modulating synesthetic thinking and decoding the urban, so the exhibition includes four.
more at
http://sivazona.hr/events/ugo-la-pietra-zagreb