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Art foundation Fondazione Centro Studi sull’Arte Licia e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti is presenting an unusual cross-sector exhibition entitled Planet City. Art, cinema, music, and design from the Rota Collection, 1900–2021. The event, scheduled for July 9 through October 24, 2021, will take place at the foundation’s exhibition space in Lucca, Tuscany. It’s being presented with the support of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca, the sponsorship of Banco BPM, and the technical sponsorship of SAIB. The main themes of the exhibition are the city and the transmission of knowledge, which will be examined through the unique personal collection of architect Italo Rota.
“A period of hopeful readjustment and recovery is now taking shape following the terrible Coronavirus pandemic,” say foundation president Alberto Fontana and director Paolo Bolpagni. “In light of these events, we thought it appropriate for our foundation to present an exhibition that goes back to the roots of our civilization, to the way that humans have organized their lives together in cities. In doing this, we wanted to put a special emphasis on the finest way there is of transmitting knowledge: books. Italo Rota’s collection proved to be a treasure chest from which we could map out pathways starting from the beginnings of contemporaneity, that is, the early twentieth century. The result is a multidisciplinary exhibition, the product of a dialogue between different sectors that combines their different knowledge sets in ways that open up intriguing explorations and discoveries. The event is a kind of archive of visual imagery of the city, all woven together by its particular aesthetic approach.”
The exhibition concept was developed by Paolo Bolpagni, with Aldo Colonetti, an architecture and design philosopher and academic, and Italo Rota himself. They worked with an expert committee in which all the different disciplines involved are represented: art history, cinema, economic geography, architecture, and urban planning. Besides Bolpagni, Colonetti, and Rota, the committee comprises Gianni Canova, film historian and dean of Università IULM in Milan; Daniele Ietri, geographer, economist, and full professor at Libera Università in Bozen; Francesco Careri, urban planning and urban art lecturer and associate professor at Università degli Studi Roma Tre; Eleonora Mastropietro, documentary maker, geographer, and researcher at Università degli Studi di Milano; and Alessandro Romanini, video art critic and expert, professor at Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara, and president of the scientific committee of Fondazione Ragghianti.
“The exhibition,” says Aldo Colonetti, “is a journey into ‘things,’ both highbrow, such as original documents from the great Utopias of the twentieth century, ranging from Bauhaus to the Californian counterculture of the sixties; and lowbrow, such as posters and everyday objects. All of this is brought together through the epistemological model of Aby Warburg, according to which art history is seen as anthropological comparison. The central focus is the city as a physical experience, in which everyone is both an inhabitant and an agent for change: Pianeta Città (Planet City) is a physical and mental journey, in which everyone will find a piece of their own story – without forgetting that, as the Greek poet Alcaeus put it, ‘cities are men, not buildings’.”
There will be over five hundred exhibits, ranging from books to works of art, movie posters, album covers, designer products, magazines, and comic books.
“I put my collection together,” explains Rota, “according to research I’ve done cross-referenced with my job. It’s based on particular interests that go to the root of certain issues, extracted from the knowledge bank of the twentieth century. After forty years of combining my collecting and my career, the collection has grown into an archive of everyday articles united by an urban theme that, together, are a way of imagining the future. The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the way we will live, to see the present of today as being made up of the works of the past. An appropriate slogan could be, ‘If all this has interested you, nothing will be the same again’.”
Parallel to the exhibition, an approximately twenty-minute documentary has been produced by Fondazione Ragghianti in collaboration with La Fournaise, which examines Rota’s collection from his own personal perspective. The film, directed by Eleonora Mastropietro, goes into Rota’s home, where he keeps his “accumulation” – as the architect calls it – of thousands of objects, artworks, and books.
Early 1900s: The Dawn of Contemporaneity
“The arrival of horseless carriages in the city and the birth of the airplane” – books and manuals for the first cars and internal combustion engines, E.P. Lehmann’s toy cars, images of the Wright brothers’ first flights, and the magnificent painting Verso San Siro (Towards San Siro) (1910–11) by Aroldo Bonzagni.
“Modern architecture” – among other exhibits, era-defining books by Peter Behrens, Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and Joseph Maria Olbrich; The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture by Antonio Sant’Elia; and beautiful, colorful glass and wood toys representing the buildings of Josef Franz Hoffmann.
The Utopia of the Avant-Garde and the New City
“The Bauhaus” – woodcuts and books by Walter Gropius and Lyonel Feininger relating to the well-known architectural movement of the 1920s, as well as books illustrated by the painters Vasilij Kandinskij, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevič, and Theo van Doesburg; fabric banknotes by Herbert Bayer; chess pieces by Joseph Hartwig; and wallpapers reflecting the Bauhaus style
“Metropolis” – movie posters and Fritz Lang’s famous 1927 film
“Graphic design of the historical avant-garde” – a focus on the Soviet movement of the 1920s and ’30s, in particular El Lissitzky and Alexandr Rodčenko, with poetic texts by Vladimir Mayakovskij
“Strolling around the pre-war city” – books by the great intellectuals of the time, including Louis Aragon, Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, Robert Musil, August Sander, and Upton Sinclair
The Horror of Nazism
“The emergence of anti-Semitic visual imaginary in 1920s Germany / Degenerate art / Leni Riefenstahl and the popular imagery of the Nazis” – lithographs, prints, banknotes, posters, and postcards from the 1936 Berlin Olympics; the terrible yellow coat of arms with the Star of David; models of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun; Gestapo cars; Riefenstahl’s photography (A chamber of horrors collected by Rota with the intent of never forgetting the evil of Nazi dehumanization.)
Master of Architecture
“Protagonists of modern architecture” – lithographs and books by Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Buckminster Fuller, and rare first-edition books by Le Corbusier from between 1923 and 1966
Science Fiction Visions
“The first robots” – books by Isaac Asimov, Karel Čapek, and Ruggero Vasari, and toy robots from 1950–60
“Wernher von Braun and space colonization in the 1950s” – films, toys, magazines, and posters about our first adventures in space
East Berlin: The Anguish of Real Socialism
“Stalinallee: Communist Berlin” – postcards, books, posters, and pins from the post-war capital of the GDR
The Boom Years
“Cybernetics connect computing and counterculture” (1950–70s) – vinyl LPs with the earliest computer music, books on cybernetics and counterculture
“Pop and the beat generation in London, 1950–60s” and “The Summer of Love of 1967” – posters and exhibition catalogs; Richard Avedon’s psychedelic portraits of the Beatles; the famous Beatles records The White Album, Yellow Submarine, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; issues of Oz and IT magazines; color lithographs from the Summer of Love
“San Francisco LSD city” (1960–70s) – issues of the San Francisco Oracle, posters and books on Los Angeles and Las Vegas
“Grendizer and the imaginary Japanese manga” – posters, comics, and photo books by Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama; plastic figurines by Takashi Murakami
Imagine the Future
“Archigram and the architectural avant-garde: a vision of the future” – extraordinary prints created by the architectural avant-garde of the 1960s, based at the Architectural Association in London; design magazines and books, including Yona Friedman’s famous Mobile Architecture from 1960; books by Le Corbusier, Ico Parisi, and Claes Oldenburg
“The birth of the environmental movement” – books about alternative culture and environmental sustainability published before their time
Scandinavian Living
“From Ellen Key to Ikea, a new way of furnishing and living: the silent revolution of the Scandinavians” – books that changed furniture internationally, from Key’s 1908 books, to books and magazines on Swedish functionalism from the 1930s, and the first Ikea catalogs from the 1950s
New Outlooks
“The new graphic design of the 1990s and 2000s” – design books by Gilles Clement, Olafur Eliasson, Rem Koolhas, John Maeda, Bruce Mau, and Hans Ulrich Obrist
Thanks to Fondazione Ragghianti and Italo Rota
Photo courtesy of Centro Studi sull'Arte Licia e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (Fondazione) and Italo Rota
