The exhibition Snozzi Vacchini Galfetti Botta: Four architects from Ticino, explores the legacy of this group of Swiss architects, the validity today, in our time of scepticism and doubts, of their response to crisis of modernism, and, finally, the potential evolution of their intellectual, creative and formal production. This workshop aims to expand this scope working around the hosting venue, the pioneering modernist ensemble designed by Juan O'Gorman for Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Cecil O'Gorman, between 1929 and 1932.
The site, composed by three studio-houses and the gardens around them, represents an early synthesis of modern ideals; its forms and spaces is the expression of new ways of living, working and, of course, thinking. Ways that are still today as revolutionary and radical as they were then. For Snozzi, Vacchini, Galfetti and Botta, these ways were still, against their times, fundamentally alive and their work aimed to deepen and refine them, while overcoming their limitations. Today, more than ninety years after their construction, we will try a new update, and the venue, O'Gorman's buildings and landscape, will provide the physical, conceptual and intellectual material for the workshop.
We will propose interventions in the site, distilling its essence and challenging its contemporaneity. The projects will be programmatically varied and of a transversal nature (architectural-artistic, conceptual-material, radical-conservative, modern-contemporary). The means of production will be of an immediate and ready-made character (collage, photography, drawing, painting, performance). The availability of the place will be mirrored and challenged by our work and our own physical presence.