Cristian Chironi – Unbuilt Venice

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Ncontemporary is happy to present Unbuilt Venice, by Cristian Chironi, a multidisciplinary artistic tinerary dedicated to the 'missed opportunities' conceived by great architects of the 20th century for Venice and its surroundings.

The theme highlights the existing contradictions of Venice between new and old and reflects the resistance to change of a city that Le Corbusier already considered ‘a totality’.

Cristian Chironi’s practice has long been declined through a language of inhabiting. The artist has lived and worked in iconic houses scattered all over the word, approaching the artistic research in multiple ways to create an inextricabe link with the architecture. In this way, dwellings become a privileged point of observation for the artist to reflect on issues related to gentrification, urban changes and social conditions, establishing a relationship with the context, which leads him to confront himself with cultures and customs that are always different.

The exhibition Unbuilt Venice stems from the ‘missed opportunity’ to inhabit four Venetian architecture, which were never built: Palazzo Masieri, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a memorial and student dormitory on the Grand Canal; the Civil Hospital assigned to Le Corbusier, which was to be built at the extreme limit of the Cannaregio district; Louis Khan’s Palace of Congress, conceived between the gardens and the arsenal of the Biennale; and finally Isamu Noguchi’s project for the park in Jesolo. Projects that were never realised, as they were considered too modern and alien to the iconographic fixity of the city. Reconsidered today, these projects reopen different reflections on the crisis of renewal that characterises Venice, where the unsustainability of tourism and depopulation represent the most dramatic aspect.

Rejected architectures, which Chironi decides to inhabit through the space of imagination and an internal time. The fulcrum of the exhibition is the sound work on vinyl, realised in collaboration with the musician Francesco 'Fuzz' Brasini, in which the ensemble of compositions is the result of the transformation into frequencies of the measurements of the four projects, performed with the use of string instruments suitably tuned to the values and dimensions of the drawings.