Nests in Milan

VIRTUAL 3D TOUR

From March 31st to July 23rd, 2022, BUILDING presents the exhibition Nests in Milan, dedicated to Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata, curated by Antonella Soldaini.

Internationally renowned for his multidisciplinary projects, Tadashi Kawamata (Hokkaido, 1953) will be showing for the first time in Milan a series of wooden installations designed specifically for the occasion. The four site-specific projects will be hosted both inside BUILDING and on its facade, and in external venues nearby: Grand Hotel et de Milan, Centro Congressi Fondazione Cariplo, and Cortile della Magnolia, Palazzo di Brera. In addition to these, there will be a fifth installation created at the ADI Design Museum.

Pushing through the limits of closed, defined settings, the installations that Kawamata has designed have less of a focus on single buildings, and more the idea of extending his intervention so as to encompass an area of the city’s urban fabric. The buildings in question are of particular civic and cultural value in the history of Milan, and Kawamata’s installations will highlight them by means of a delicate yet spectacular process of transformation.

The artist will be appropriating their facades, internal spaces, balconies and roofs, with a series of constructions made of wooden planks interwoven to form a complex grid which is both light-weight yet solid, offering a different interpretation of the appearance and meaning of each urban structure.

All projects gravitate around a single, highly symbolic theme, that of the nest, that Kawamata first began working with in 1998. This primary structure conveys a positive, reassuring sensation, reinforced by the fact of being a simple construction in a natural element like wood – compared to the much more complex architectural construction it is placed on, a stratification of social and cultural elements.