'What Mad Pursuit' at Teatro dell’architettura: architecture as photography and vice versa

Architecture has always been a recurring subject in photography since the first appearance of this medium: starting from the large-scale views of cities and monuments captured by daguerreotypes in the 1840s, architecture has gradually become the object of a perspective, more attentive to details and formal implications of composition. Even though documentation is still one of the main purposes of contemporary architecture photography, the subject keeps transforming itself not only through photographers’ gaze, but also thanks to the context it interacts with. What Mad Pursuit, the exhibition curated by Francesco Zanot, currently on view at the Teatro dell’architettura in the Swiss city of Mendrisio, reflects on the evolution of this subject through a selection of around 50 works by three internationally renowned photographers: Aglaia Konrad, Armin Linke and Bas Princen.

The originality of What Mad Pursuit lies in the constant process of negotiation between the places captured by the photographs on display and the architecture that welcomes them. Considering the venue chosen for this exhibition, we are far away from the “white cube” stereotype: inaugurated in 2018, Teatro dell’architettura was originally projected by the Swiss architect Mario Botta—whose life and work have always been deeply rooted in Mendrisio—and is now a multi-functional space and core of USI Academy of Architecture. Characterised by an alternation of curved and squared lines that wrap within a circular floor plan to the large domed roof, Teatro dell’architettura is crossed by two red and grey floors unfolding around the void of the central atrium.

The title of this exhibition takes inspiration from an essay of the same name by the British neuroscientist Francis Crick (1988), where he wrote that "hybrid subjects are often astonishingly fertile," highlighting how exchange is often more beneficial than isolation. Moving back from science to architecture, the mutual relation between the internal space of the frame and the external space is the main focus of the exhibition. In the photographic series Shaping Stones, Aglaia Konrad (Salzburg, 1960) chooses to investigate buildings that share the same material and mode of representation (black and white photography) and end up looking like a homogenous ensemble, even though they were designed by architects who were completely different in recognition and historical era. Instead of proposing a specific series of works, Armin Linke (Milan, 1966) reveals a more heterogeneous selection of photographs from his archive, without following any chronologic or linear order and going beyond their original context. Last but not the least, Bas Princen (Zeeland, the Netherlands 1975) reflects on one of the most frequent objects of debate in modern visual culture—the value of duplication and further layers of meaning this process adds—while photographing other representations of architecture (not necessarily made by resorting to the same medium).

These photographs, whose palette is mostly neutral and often turns into black and white, re-emerge from the space of the Teatro almost like inorganic concretions, in a continuous play of resignification. Revealing not only their presence but also their materiality, they challenge another recurring stereotype: photography as a purely bi-dimensional kind of representation. This materiality is more evident in Princen’s photographs, which are printed on rice paper, while Konrad’s images adapt to the surface of the wall and, on the other side, Linke prefers to transform his works into installations with more properly architectural and, at times, choreographic characteristics.

Despite the structure of Teatro dell’architettura is mostly based on the model of anatomical theatres (buildings specifically projected to teach anatomy in early modern universities), the name of this venue contains multiple meanings dialoguing with the exhibition’s topic in a particularly effective way. According to the Western tradition, a "theatre" is a kind of building whose architecture is designed not only depending on the aim of showing something or someone but also depending on the act of watching itself. Especially between the 18^th and the 19^th century, social conventions shaped European theatres devoted to performing arts as public places that were built not only to make people see but also to give them the chance to be seen. While visiting What Mad Pursuit, the visitor becomes involved in a mutual relationship with the photographs on display by constantly exchanging the roles of observer and object of the gaze itself. For this reason, the places primarily chosen by the photographers' gaze should not be conceived as eye-catching views that open before us like imaginary windows, but rather as actual characters that make this space their dwelling.

'What Mad Pursuit' is on view at the Teatro dell’architettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland, until October 22, 2023.