URBAN INTIMACIES 1
Berlin
For immediate release – The exhibition Urban Intimacies accumulates paired photographs, slides, titles, text, projects diagrams and super 8 film with the sound of poetic utterance to enact the potentials of architecture within the space of the gallery. It is a collaborative project by architects Paloma Hernaiz and Jaime Oliver, directors of OH / Architecture and Urban Strategy, photographers Andrea Caruso, Alberto Gobbino and Carlo Frigerio of Ciszak Dalmas Tamagno, poet Gonzalo Escarpa and graphic designer Francisco Villar of Tres Tipos Gráficos. Urban Intimacies is curated by Tina DiCarlo, former curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
As photographs what is presented here would hold limited allure. As architecture they insert themselves into a context to begin alter it, to make architecture heard and seen. Fashion photography, along with its mythic attachment to the superficiality of appearances, is exacerbated, invoked as a documentary and ironically critical device to relegate architecture to the background, recasting it as one protagonist among others. Narrative is continuously re-written by architect, curator, photographer, stylist, poet, graphic designer, spectator, to reveal an endless space of potentiality, residing between performative utterance, documentary device, building, drawing, narrative and script. Urban Intimacies is inspired by a recent project by OH architects: a peculiar penthouse hidden in the center of Madrid in which perverse spatial conditions and adjacencies gives rise to an unexpected set of potentials. Mirroring the desires that underlie the design of the house itself, architecture is presenced in the gaps between media, between images and sound, as a space of desire within the space of the exhibition, in which the spectator becomes at once actor, reader, performer, interpreter, translator.
A 64-page publication designed by Tres Tipos Gráficos including an essay by Tina DiCarlo, photographs by Ciszak Dalmas Tamagno and Miguel de Guzman, poetry by Gonzalo Escarpa, drawings and text by OH / Paloma Hernaiz and Jaime Oliver accompanies the exhibition. Gonzalo Escarpa will perform a Perfopoesia event (poetry performance) during the opening at 20:00.
The exhibition and publication are generously sponsored by the Embassy of Spain in Berlin.
OHLAB Team: Paloma Hernaiz and Jaime Oliver
Photography: Ciszak Dalmas Tamagno / Miguel de Guzmán
Poetry: Gonzalo Escarpa
Graphic design: Tres tipos gráficos
Presented by: ASAP and Magnus Müller Gallery
Special thanks to: José Antonio de Ory, Itziar Taboada Aquerreta