Gabriele Basilico / Walter Marchetti

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Gabriele Basilico Archive Beirut
&
Walter Marchetti Retrospective

Wednesday the 4th of December 2024 starting at 19:00

Via Lodovico il Moro 1, Milano

Gabriele Basilico Archive Beirut

Unique material from the Archive of photographer Gabriele Basilico will be displayed, including contact sheets, notebooks, working prints and exhibition prints. The selection has been personally curated by Giovanna Calvenzi with the aim of offering intimate and in depth access to the entire process which led Gabriele Basilico to the completion of a massive survey of Beirut’s urban environment in 4 subsequent photographic missions: 1991, 2003, 2008 and 2011.

In 1991 the Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé, on behalf of the Hariri Foundation, invited an international group of photographers to document the central area of the city of Beirut, devastated by a war which lasted fifteen years, before its subsequent reconstruction. Gabriele Basilico, René Burri, Raymond Depardon, Fouad Elkoury, Robert Frank and Josef Koudelka participated in the project. In 2003 Stefano Boeri, director of the architecture magazine Domus, proposed to Gabriele Basilico to document the reconstruction of the city by capturing urban views corresponding to the photographs previously made in 1991. In 2008, Gabriele Basilico went to Beirut for the presentation of one of his exhibitions at the Planet Discovery Center. On that occasion he continued to photograph the city, documenting its reconstruction, this time without a specific assignment and also moving away from the historic city center. The Hariri Foundation decided in 2009 to launch a second collective photographic documentation mission with the aim of creating a visual archive which would bear witness to the reconstruction of the city. The Foundation invited Fouad Elkoury (who was present in 1991 and who was also the coordinator of the new mission), Klavdij Sluban, Robert Polidori and Gabriele Basilico, who then conducted work in Beirut in 2011.

Basilico himself wrote in 2003: "The practice of returning creates a singular sentimental disposition: like waiting for a desired encounter, an awakening of the memory for places, objects, people, like turning on the engine of a car which had been idle for a long time. In the case of Beirut, it was even longer."

The exhibition is made possible thanks to the generous collaboration of Archivio Gabriele Basilico

Archivio Gabriele Basilico inaugurates our new initiative House of Estates.

House of Estates is a program launched by settantaventidue for the permanent public hosting of the archives of significant international artists from the XX Century. A selection of works and materials from the Estates who adhere to the program will be permanently present at settantaventidue and accessible to the public for viewing and research, while rotating exhibitions will be organized at settantaventidue for all member Estates.

Walter Marchetti Retrospective

The exhibition represents the most comprehensive retrospective done in Milan of the work by Walter Marchetti, and is curated by his lifelong collaborator, musicologist Gabriele Bonomo.

Walter Marchetti (Canosa di Puglia 1931 - Milan 2015) was one of the most original and controversial composers of contemporary musical creation in the world. In his works he has always explored and focused on that blurred borderline which binds music to its visual representation. He achieved this with a truly unmistakable and incomparable rigor, blending subtle provocation and paradox, never without, however, a refined poetic allusiveness. An undisputed protagonist of the Neo-avantgarde music scene since the late 1950s under the aegis of Bruno Maderna, he was also one of the first European composers to accept the iconoclastic challenge of John Cage’s Dekomponieren. He was a pioneer of action music and performance practice, and in 1964 his historic collaboration with Juan Hidalgo in Madrid gave rise to the legendary ZAJ group. His works, as a whole, constitute one of the rare examples of conscious extension of aesthetic radicalism to musical poetics.

Artworks on display will include:

L’uccello del Paradiso. Caccia in città / The Bird of Paradise. Hunting in the City (1996)

Musica da camera n. 182 / Chamber Music No. 182

De musicorum infelicitate. Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations

19 Pezzi facili / 19 Easy Pieces

Le secche del tempo / The Shallows of Time

The exhibition is made possible thanks to the generous collaboration of Alga Marghen and Egidio Marzona Sammlung

Conceptual and minimal art, electroacoustic experimentation, sound art and field recording, radical and utopian architecture, are at the centre settantaventidue’s program.

settantaventidue is committed to an articulated and rigorous cultural proposal, concentrating specifically on experimentation and research in the fields of visual, sonic and architectural arts with determined and consistent trajectories estranged from mainstream culture, conventional artistic discourses, and market dynamics.

All of settantaventidue’s cultural activities are entirely organized and financed by the non-profit entity Umbra Grey ETS, thanks to the generous collaboration of:

Main partner and supporter:

Kira A. Princess of Prussia Foundation, Germany

Partners:

TomoTomo, Milano

Paper&People, Milano

Zurich Insurance Plc Italia & Consulenze Assicurative srl-Brescia

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