Giovanna Silva – Mr Bawa I suppose

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CAMPO presents a work by the architect and photographer Giovanna Silva on the architecture of Geoffrey Manning Bawa, one of the most influent Asian architects of his generation.
In his long and prestigious career Bawa has been a forerunner of what is globally known as Tropical Modernism, “an architecture that is a blend of both modern and traditional, east and west, formal and picturesque, disrupting the walls between inside and outside, building and landscape, offering a blueprint of new ways to live and work in a tropical city.” Bawa tailored modern buildings to a specific environment.

The title of the exhibition, “Mr Bawa, I suppose”, comes from the inner dialogue which takes place every time the author is in front of one of Geoffrey Manning Bawa buildings.
In her photographs Silva explores the fleeting edge where different worlds meet. Along these lines of accidental collision, the architectural language withdraws and gives way to places slowly shaped between our memory and vision. Focusing on the results that this collision produces, Giovanna Silva provides us an unusual perspective on architecture and landscape: “I start to take picture while the world still asleep; I manage to immerse the buildings in a suspended dimension. They seem inhabited, a part from the trace left by people the day before. The result is a photo of unclean architecture, apparently inanimate but instead dotted with objects testifying the secret life of architecture.”

The photographs will be showcased in Campo and in the street between CAMPO and the Leporello bookstore where the Giovanna Silva Books will be displayed .
The exibition is a path in the city where the work could meet the absent-minded look of the passer-by. The street is the place where Silva’s encounter with Bawa’s work can live again in each chance encounter between the photographs and the involuntary gaze of the viewer. Together with Silva we might think: “Mr Bawa, I suppose”.

Giovanna Silva lives and works in Milano. From 2005 to 2007 she contributed to the journal «Domus», and from 2007 until 2011 she was photo editor of the journal «Abitare». She photographed Renzo Piano and Zaha Hadid for the special issues of «Abitare» Being Renzo Piano and Being Zaha Hadid. She published Desertions, A+M bookstore, about her american journey with Enzo Mari; Baghdad, Green Zone, Red Zone, Babylon; Libya: Inch by Inch, House by House, Alley by Alley; Syria: a Travel Guide to Disappereance; Afghanistan 0rh-, Mousse Publishing and Good Boy and Walk Like an Egyptian, Motto Publishing. She partecipated at 14. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura di Venezia with her project Nightswimming, Discotheques in Italy from the 1960s until now. The project was published by Bedford Press and AA London. She is in the editorial board of San Rocco Magazine
She is the editor of Humboldt Books.
PRESS KIT
CAMPO is a space to debate, study and celebrate architecture, born in Rome out of the collaboration between Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Luca Galofaro e Davide Sacconi.

CAMPO invites researchers, professionals and students to expose projects, experiments and researches that challenge the current understanding of the city, and to collaborate in the investigation of the potential and the limits of architecture as a form of collective production and common knowledge.