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Estro
Via San Rocco Prosdocimo 30, 35139 Padova
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Italy
Tel.++39 049 8725487
Fax++39 049 8725487
Hours: Tue.-Sat. 4pm-7:30pm.
Contact: Elga Pellizzari
E-mail: estroarte@libero.it
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Gea Casolaro Humanlandscape
Architecture and town planning have always held an organizational role in society, aiming to give a sense of purpose and completion to private and public buildings alike. Contemporary urban living, however, continually calls into question the idea of space as being predetermined and predeterminable. In other words, landscape, and the urban landscape in particular, can no longer be considered stable and unchanging. Rather, it is a place of continual passage, of amorphous fluidity, whether it is considered as a physical vessel or purely from the point of view of its visual viability. Photography—and the same holds true for much painting and monumental or commemorative sculpture—has a predefined concept of landscape as contemplative, not active. Yet, from the times of the very earliest settlers, anyone crossing a landscape has changed its very make-up, has effected a radical alteration. Set structures built to specific criteria in which huge numbers of people dwell are modified by those who use it and hence call into question the validity of its original function. The biggest factor in the volatility of the contemporary landscape, however, is the observation that even the looks of those who pass by act as an element of change. The landscape is restructured, rebuilt, destroyed, and restored every time someone new, someone with a different mind-set, casts their eyes over it and makes the place their own. Nowhere can be univocal any longer: the knowledge of all these possible interpretations means that every passer-by becomes, by look alone, an actor on the stage on which he lives. In Gea Casolaro’s work, it is the looks of others that make reality, whether this is the intimate reality of a portrait, as in Mirrors (1997), or the physical reality of the urban landscape, as in “Human Landscapes” (1997). In both these works it is the vision of the Other that identifies all the possible variations of Casolaro’s non-definition of a given visual object. Casolaro’s work does not provide the viewer with a wholly pre-defined representation of a place or a person. Instead, she presents the viewer with the idea that every time the reality she has depicted is observed, it will be radically transformed. It is no coincidence that the entire “Human Landscapes” series was photographed in Berlin, a city that perfectly articulates this modern-day dilemma: on the one hand there is the official architecture, which tends to rebuild and restructure the immense, often empty, urban fabric; on the other there is the home-building, the permeation of everyday life and culture, that tends to precariously fill the empty spaces of the official architecture, without any pretense to “re-classify” them. There is a strong feeling in Casolaro’s work that a long subway corridor, or an area of buildings that seem made out of Lego, cannot be any less than a myriad variations on the built theme. With their looks, their opinions, their waits, their thoughts, and their tentative temporary constructions, everyone who has crossed the threshold of those spaces has brought to them a different interpretation. In other words, the true architecture of the future is the architecture of looks.
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