Page 90 - 50.La Biennale di Venezia issue of World of Art Magazine

AR ATA ISOZAKI
ELECTRIC L ABYRINTH
1968 / 2002,
© AR ATA ISOZ AKI &
CASTELLO DI RIVOLI ASSOCIATES, JAPAN

COURTESY ZKM,
K ARLSRUHE

Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting Electric
Labyrinth, a reconstruction of a multimedia installation originally
created by Arata Isozaki in 1968, for the XIV Milan Triennale.
Quotations are from the text by Hans Ulrich
Obrist in “Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Immediately destroyed during a historic occupation of the Triennale
Science, Religion and Art”, Edited by Bruno Latour building, the installation was reconstructed by Isozaki in 2002 and can
and PeterWeibel ZKM I Zentrum für Kunst und now be seen by the Italian public for the first time.
Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, The MIT Press, In 1968, the XIV Milan Triennale opened at a time when political and
Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 2002. social tensions were at their height. On May 30th, during the press
conference of the XIV Triennale di Milano several hundreds of artists,
intellectuals and architecture professors from the Milan University
stormed the Trierinale area and occupied it for the 10 days to come.
By the end of the occupation, this historical exhibition of 1960s critical
avant-garde architecture was almost completely destroyed. Although it
looked carefully at the then nascent protest movement, the exhibition,
within which the room designed by Isozaki represented one of the most
AR ATA ISOZAKI noteworthy contributions, was completely destroyed.
ELECTRIC L ABYRINTH Isozaki describes his project for the Trienrtale in the following words “I
1968 / 2002, didn’t see the opening because it was completely taken over by these
young artists and students protesting. At the time, of course, similar
© AR ATA ISOZ AKI &
movements against the establishment were also going on in Japan.
ASSOCIATES, JAPAN
Because I sympathised with these protests, I tried to reflect them in my
COURTESY ZKM,
K ARLSRUHE

90 WORLD of ART