The photo exhibition ‘Brutalist Italy’ was inaugurated in Berlin. The exhibition is dedicated to the photo documentation created by Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego, who travelled over 20,000 kilometres across the Italian peninsula to photograph the buildings of Brutalism, ranging from the Casa del Portuale in Naples to the Jesi Cemetery, from the Temple of Monte Grisa in Trieste to the residential complex Le Lavatrici in Genoa.
The idea for the exhibition stems from the publication of the same name by Conte and Perego (Brutalist Italy. Concrete Architecture from the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea, Fuel London 2023), which presents a selection of more than one hundred Italian Brutalist buildings described through 146 pictures, and has met with considerable public and critical acclaim internationally.
The introduction by Adrian Forty reads as follows: “It is above all in the willingness to recognise that concrete can refer to more than one era, representing both the present (or future) and the past, that Italian architects have distinguished themselves from their colleagues abroad. During the 20th century, concrete was predominantly considered a future-oriented material: it indicated an era that had not yet arrived and it was strenuously denied it also had a past. But the specific circumstances in Italy made architects eager to represent its past as well as its future.”’
It is an initiative of the DGDP – Unit for the Coordination of Italian Cultural Institutes of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin.
Photo credit: © Riccardo Malberti
