On the occasion of the 22nd Giornata del Contemporaneo, on Saturday, 10 October at 11:00 a.m., the Pietro and Alberto Rossini Foundation invites the public to meet Margherita Moscardini, the artist featured in the exhibition To take my wife to school and run errands, curated by Francesca Guerisoli.
The event will take place in the James Wines Pavilion at Rossini Art Site, where the artist will present and discuss with the audience 1XUNKNOWN 1942–2018 to Fortress Europe with Love (2012–2018), one of the projects through which Moscardini has explored the relationship between architecture, borders and the construction of European identity.
Developed between 2012 and 2018, the project grew out of an extensive research journey along Europe’s Atlantic coast, from the Atlantic Pyrenees to Norway, tracing the remains of the Atlantic Wall, the defensive line built by the Third Reich to protect the so-called “Fortress Europe”. This military infrastructure, comprising more than 15,000 reinforced-concrete fortifications, was never completed. Its bunkers survive today across the European landscape, variously absorbed into their surroundings, abandoned or transformed.
Margherita Moscardini travelled through these territories, locating and filming the surviving structures. The 21 videos produced between 2012 and 2018 form the core of the project. 1XUNKNOWN 1942–2018 to Fortress Europe with Love brings together and organises the materials from this research in a volume comprising 32 prints, 21 USB drives containing the videos, and a copy of Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, a seminal text for understanding the military architecture of the Atlantic Wall.
The event will offer an opportunity to gain direct insight into Margherita Moscardini’s working process and to discuss how structures originally built to defend a border can continue to exist and raise questions in the present, bringing together historical memory, territory and the contemporary forms through which Europe constructs and represents its borders.
The event is part of To take my wife to school and run errands, an exhibition produced by the Pietro and Alberto Rossini Foundation and conceived specifically for the James Wines Pavilion. Moscardini’s solo exhibition unfolds as a constellation of works from different stages of her artistic research. The exhibition marks a new chapter in the relationship between the artist and the Foundation, which began more than ten years ago and has developed through acquisitions, productions and support for international exhibition projects.
