Domus

Castello di Rivoli holds and hosts the first survey exhibition in Europe featuring Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz (Great Neck, NY, 1973), winner of the prestigious Nasher Prize 2020. We had a long conversation with him about practices and approaches voted to enhance pure liaisons.

(excerpt)
Dealing with architecture, it is all about living in a city and thinking about the social connections and the networks of people that really defines cities. In a way, projects about buildings, became even a lot more complicated than searching for new answers to me, when I started to develop a project called ParaSITE (1998-ongoing. Plastic bags, polyethylene tubing, hooks, tape. Different urban sites in New York City, Boston and Cambridge MA, and Baltimore MD). In this case I was creating shelter for each individual responding not only for their needs but also to their desires. It’s the person inside a building that is more important than the building itself. And a project about architecture is always a project about portraiture. An extension of the space it’s even an annex to the body of a person.

Thus, I started to think more precisely about cities and inspired by Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) I began to cultivate an idea of being together slowing time down, creating a holding-space where people are gathered. That’s the kind of way I’d aim connecting all of this works. A sort of a lens, zooming closer and closer and closer to a primal scene, in terms of our collecting history.

The Beatles and The Break-up (2010 - ongoing) have allowed me to work in a non-orthodox way. So, the fact that I could talk about culinary processes and architecture is to find non-expected and experimental parcours. And each of The Beatles album represents a step further away from the previous ones. I admire such a progressing very much.