Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Un controluce

Abstract

Italy: The New Domestic Landscape is an intriguing exhibition in several respects. Because of numerous articles, critique, reenactment, and academic research published throughout the past fifty years, the show was mythologised and has not ceased to prompt researchers and scholars to deal with it
again.

The current contribution represents a brief attempt to approach the matter by paying particular attention to the legacy and significance of the exhibition design. The MoMA exhibition sounds like a story of reversals, mainly because of the one between inside and outside. Surprisingly the environments are displayed among the museum rooms while the objects are shown outside.
The curator decides to interrupt a museographic tradition that favours the objects set with a background by presenting them “alone”, far from the domestic interiors where they are usually displayed, housing them in small towers that suggest various controversial readings. It is in the exhibition innate contradictions that its style emerges.