Internationally renowned artist Tadashi Kawamata will be showing for the first time in Milan a series of wooden installations designed specifically for the occasion. Sources: Timberbiz, inexhibit
The four site-specific projects will be hosted both inside the building (Via Monte di Pietà 23) and on its facade, and in other venues nearby such as Grand Hotel et de Milan (Via Manzoni 29), Centro Congressi Fondazione Cariplo (Via Romagnosi 8), and Cortile della Magnolia of the Palazzo di Brera (Via Brera 28).
Other cities in Europe have hosted Mr Kawamata’s designs such as on a light pole in Bonn, on the Centre Georges in Paris and on the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. His wooden nests evoke the basic need of humans and animals for a shelter.
The installations that Mr Kawamata has designed have less of a focus on buildings, and more the idea of extending his intervention so as to encompass an area of the city’s urban fabric.
The buildings in question are of particular civic and cultural value in the history of Milan, and Kawamata’s installations will highlight them with his artworks.
The artist will be appropriating their facades, internal spaces, balconies and roofs, with a series of constructions made of wooden planks interwoven to form a complex grid which is both lightweight yet solid, offering a different interpretation of the appearance and meaning of each urban structure.
All projects gravitate around a single, highly symbolic theme, that of the nest, that Mr Kawamata first began working with in 1998. This primary structure conveys a positive, reassuring sensation, reinforced by the fact of being a simple construction in a natural element like wood – compared with the much more complex architectural construction it is placed on, a stratification of social and cultural elements.
