Italy

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In a famous essay about the relationship between feminism and architecture, Mary McLeod noted how Foucault, in articulating the concept of heterotopia ‘seems to have expressed an unconscious disdain for aspects of everyday life such as the home, the public park and the department store, which were instead provinces in which women found not only oppression, but also a degree of comfort, security, autonomy and even freedom.’ The backdrop for this exhibition is a work by the English architect naturalized Swedish Ralph Erskine, called Shopping, which opened in September 1955 in Luleå, a town on the edge of the Arctic Circle where most of the population of Norrbotten is concentrated. With its hard-to-reach location, this building received little attention from architectural critics, who were only interested in it as something it was not: the first shopping mall in history. In spite of its name, the building is in fact rather like a passage, a shopping mall with no underground parking and no car access, located in the very center of the city. The importance of the building did not escape to Mai Zetterling - the first female director to win an award for directing at the Venice Film Festival after the war with the short film War Game (1962) - who set the decisive sequences of Flickorna (The Girls, 1968), a milestone in the promotion of a culture of equality and gender diversity (from which the title line of the exhibition is taken). By juxtaposing the projection of this film transposition of Aristophanes' Lysistrata with the transfigurations of promotional and documentary images conserved in the archives that in various ways give an account of the commercial gallery's past, the exhibition intends to make explicit the contestation to the stereotyped image of the “Swedish woman” that asserted itself on the international scene, and more specifically in Italian cinema, from the end of the 1950s onwards. In order to gain a physical and bodily awareness of how much Shopping's architecture has been and still continues to be a field of confrontation and redefinition of gender identity, those who visit the exhibition will have the concrete possibility of tracing its complex inner atrium and directly comparing it with figurines, caricatures (macchietta)
and human representations of the time, giving life to the performance of a real ‘animated view’.

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Videos

CITY’SCAPE begins, a two-day event dedicated to LANDSCAPE DESIGN that will showcase the most current themes at the Triennale di Milano. Over 40 speakers from 10 countries, including Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Croatia, Turkey, Denmark, China, Finland, and Italy, will participate in the eighth edition of the International Symposium and award "CITY’SCAPE - Landscape design as a strategy in climate change for urban and social resilience," scheduled for July 11th and 12th in the prestigious setting of the Salone d’Onore of the Triennale di Milano.

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