OMA has opened its new exhibition, entitled "Prospettiva. Viaggio negli archivi di Fondazione Fiera Milano / Perspective", which provides a collage-like journey through the Archives of Fondazione Fiera Milano, curated and designed by OMA’s Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, opened in Milan last week. 

Prospettiva marks the launch of the Archivi fotografici project, resulting from a new partnership between Fondazione Fiera Milano, AFIP International (Association of Professional Italian Photographers) and Triennale di Milano, and offers the public the opportunity to see the photographic collections of the Archivio della Fondazione Fiera Milano.

The exhibition portrays Italian and European society and economy in the last century through the lens of the cultural legacy of Fiera Milano, the international trade fair in Milan which presented the newest industrial developments and products since it was first organized in 1920. 

The exhibition is designed as a journey through the archives of the Fondazione Fiera, with countless materials on display which are a testimony of over ninety years of Italian and international industrial history, showing how the fair has been the privileged stage of the country's economic, political, social and cultural life.

Aiming to create an immersive visual journey, OMA has designed a non-linear collage of stories, formats and experiences, highlighting a selection of events, testimonies and reconstructions that made the fair a door to the rest of the world, exploring themes that anticipated the challenges of our time.

"The photographic archive of Fondazione Fiera Milano is a treasure trove: generic or authorial images, intimate or grandiose, of sophisticated outfits or industrial machinery, of food or pistons, of architecture or livestock, of great personalities or common people," said Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli.

"Different worlds but also different moments in time coexisted within the same space; the photographs are testimonies of a machine of wonders that returned in a continuous cycle. This exhibition is at the same time a reflection on the notion of an archive as a tool to rediscover and contextualize our time, and on the history of the Fiera as a privileged window on the construction of Italian and International Modernity."

Following exhibitions Chronicles of a Creative Itinerary on the history of department store Galeries Lafayette (2012) and R100-Rinascente: Stories of Innovation (2017) showing the department store La Rinascente’s long creative history, Prospettiva is a continuation of OMA’s interest in curating and displaying archival material of 20th Century industry and its relationship to history, politics and culture, in multi-dimensional exhibition designs. 

Prospettiva. Viaggio negli archivi di Fondazione Fiera Milano is on view at the Triennale di Milano from 23 November to 20 January 2019. OMA team, led by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, is the creative director for Manifesta 12 Palermo. 

All images © Andrea Centonze

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