CASE STUDY, 2000 - 2001

Case Study, a series of large color C-Prints investigates the Colonia Novarese, a modernist building on the waterfront near Rimini, Italy, which was built in 1934 as a fascist youth camp. The photographs capture the building’s rationalist streamline architecture designed in the shape of a boat. Some images portray vast bare interiors where painterly surfaces play with the architectonic structure of the building. Others show the interaction of architecture with the surrounding seascape and overpowering nature. Still others create a surreal atmosphere of decay through the accumulation of dirt, broken furniture and decomposing clothes.

The romantic beauty of the images opens itself to other layers of meaning. Images of decay become a metaphor for the fascist ideology that informed the construction of the building, overshadowing the modernist architecture and the fascinating interiors. It is a symbolic clash of two opposed utopian ideologies: fascism and rationalism.

I see this neglected building as contested territory, carrying the mark of an ideologically charged architecture. Today the building is slowly decaying after decades of abandonment, thus metaphorically representing the inner landscape of the generation, which lived through Fascism.

2003
Absences: Curators' Choice, Photographs of Urban Alienation Tenri Institute of New York, , NY

2001
Case Study, Marcello Marvelli Fine Arts, NewYork, NY (solo exhibition)

Un relitto moderno - la Colonia Novarese di Rimini, Gambalunga Museum, Rimini, Italy (solo exhibition, catalogue)

2001
The Entropic Garden, Wake Forest University Fine Arts Gallery, NC

Screen, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, NY