The University of Harvard will host “END. Words from the margins – New York City” the exhibition of Antonio Rovaldi, the winning project of the fifth edition of the Italian Council, the program for the promotion of contemporary Italian art in the world of the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity and Regeneration Urban of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.
The exhibition
A journey on foot along the natural edges of the five boroughs of New York City: one which, through more than six hundred photographs accompanied by maps and drawings, explores an original image of the most iconic and represented cities in the world.
The exhibition references the volume, published by Humboldt Books, The Sound of Woodpecker Bill: New York City, the fruit of a collaboration between Italian artist Antonio Rovaldi and Francesca Benedetto, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at Harvard GSD. The publication also features contributions from a series of authors who, through their accounts, share a New York with the reader which is ordinary, hidden, and far away, constituting an essential and highly contemporary lens through which to view the future of the city itself, along with its neighborhoods and inhabitants.
This long, almost cinematic walk along its waterfronts is split into various chapters, also in the display presented in the Loeb Library. These are further investigations of the journey narrated in the book, photographs, drawings, videos, sounds and objects all come to the fore in the rooms of the library. The overall scenario that emerges is a sort of silent archeology which draws out a timeline weaving together a geological past with a present in a constant state of change and an uncertain future.
The illustrated maps are presented in tandem with the long photo sequences, and through a range of various space-time scales, the reader is led through a geography which is at the same time physical and virtual.
Both the publication and the exhibition are the upshot of a project promoted by GAMeC (Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo/Italy), winner of the fifth edition of the Italian Council call (2019), in partnership with Harvard- GSD, Magazzino Italian Art, and the St. Gallen Kunst Museum.
On 13 February 2020 the exhibition will move to Bergamo, and will be visible until 18 May.
Antonio Rovaldi
End. Words from the Margins, New York City
12 November, 18:30
Loeb Library – Department of Landscape Architecture, Harvard University
Graduate School of Design, Boston, USA