The City of Lights

The night sky with its infinity of stars and the daytime sky with its sun provide the palette with which the design is experimenting. The research and works that have gone into this exhibition, a balance of technology and poetry, clearly evidence how the re-interpreted luminous objects light a pathway leading to the future. “Artificial stars” are all the luminous devices that the “astronomer-designers” are examining, coming up with objects that show luminous happenings, orbiting spheres, reflective surfaces, blinding eclipses, coloured  dawns, celestial hues. The exhibition is configured around the presence (or absence) of light, and its ability to change the perception of space. A fragmented floor plan maps out an internal path across spaces characterised by different luminous atmospheres – darkness, semi-darkness, pure light and vice versa – exalting the essence of the works on show.

Dawns. The Lights of Tomorrow
Curated by Matteo Pirola
Exhibition Project: From Outer Space
Pavilion 9

Photo Credits: Nadja Schlenker

An exhibition of architectural images of interiors in which artificial light is the protagonist. A show populated with figures, accents, glows, constellations, rhythms, points, vectors and the occasional “capriccio” of light in which a lightbulb or light source can be made out, creatively inhabiting and transforming the space in a special way.

It is neither an historical nor a chronological exhibition, nor indeed is it structured according to technical lighting criteria – such as light as a service element and light as a vehicle for information and meaning, with the accent on the latter aspect – but is ordered by interpretation keys, and categories that invite the viewer to look at families of design solutions, particular details, and genuine inventions, as collections of large and small case studies.

A selection of dozens of photographs, accompanied by informative comments, illustrate luminous artifacts ranging from small “grafts” to veritable full-scale architectural creations, from great masters to the youngest of designers, past icons rooted in our memories and images that have perhaps been overlooked or forgotten, in a bid to narrate a small, by no means exhaustive inventory of luminous poetics, languages and approaches.

“The distinguishing factor of exhibitions on architecture is that the latter cannot be present itself. It has to rely on substitutes, and when it comes to light, photography is one of the most fitting. However, Night Interiors is not a photographic exhibition in the strictest sense, rather a short journey across images that have punctuated modern and contemporary design with interiors containing luminous insights that surprise, give pleasure and are still capable of stoking new ideas,” said Michele Calzavara.

Exhibition Concept
The exhibition project is characterised by unusual material choices, with particular focus on their chromatic and luminous properties, and by an architectural conformation that provides for two parallel functions simultaneously: the exhibition space itself, and a space given over to workshops and professional meetings. This duality is catered for by two converging paths and is interpreted by a powerfully geometric floor plan, with volumes that evidence reciprocal relationships as well as the autonomy of the individual parts. 
The exhibition path has been devised to provide a progressive experience of the space and bring the story to life in a stratified continuum. The photographs on show, of different formats and on different supports, have been grouped into a number of visual clusters that play out on a common horizon, as the through line of the curatorial narrative. Rather like intangible instructions, these visual compositions highlight the relationships between the various case studies that make up the narrative categories, visualised through different exhibition modalities: lengthy wall sequences, horizontal planes and luminous surfaces inform a path with an elastic rhythm and affording different levels of fruition.

The path culminates in the workshop space, seen as an open, multi-purpose, even intimate area, in which further insights into the subject of artificial light can be gleaned from sectoral professionals.

“In some ways, thinking about an installation is rather like designing a lighting device: its main purpose is to “shed light” and therefore to render its intangible essence concrete. Whilst also allowing it to be distributed, faceted, filtered, transmitted and transformed. In this case, light is also the subject of the exhibition. Light for images whose representation requires different artifices in order to be evoked each time,” said Berfu Bengisu Goren.
 

Interno notte. Bright Artifacts
Curated by Michele Calzavara
Exhibition Project: Berfu Bengisu Goren
Pavilion 15

Seven exhibition spaces will be created along the entire exhibition path of the four Euroluce pavilions, making up a widespread installation, made up of different forms brought together by a unitary language, fragments of architecture that will host designs, photographs, paintings, video installations, single works or families of objects. Each work will be accompanied by a critical comment written by different authors, some of the newest and most authoritative contemporary critics. For this project, Formafantasma has devised a modular display system made from wood and paper. Despite their different configurations, the structures all feature the repetition of a frame encompassing the paper. The studio’s intention was to come up with a “light” display system, reusable and suitable for recycling at end of life. The materials are all easily disassembled and paint has been deliberately eschewed in order to leave the materials and joints visible. The design of the configurations is geared to providing spaces suitable for showcasing the works whilst also creating places where visitors can rest and relax.

Constellations
Curated by Beppe Finessi
Installation by Formafantasma
Pavillion 9-11, 13-15

Andrea Bowers 
Chandeliers of Interconnectedness (The world is so beautiful even as it burns; Quote used by permission of Terry Tempest Williams) 
2022 
“The world is so beautiful even as it burns”, copyright © 2019 by Terry Tempest Williams, from the book EROSION: ESSAYS OF UNDOING, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. Courtesy of the artist and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York 
Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Maurizio Nannucci, one of the most powerful interpreters of artificial light in contemporary art, will create a site-specific installation, a long luminous neon phrase: “YOU CAN IMAGINE THE OPPOSITE” which exhorts the viewer to feel free to take a creative, curious and virtuous approach. Once the event is over, the work will be installed at the Milan Polytechnic University, as a sign of the importance of the value of school and of education.

You can imagine the opposite
Maurizio Nannucci 
Pavilion 9