Homo faber or the design jazz player are just some of the attributes that accompanied Ugo La Pietra's grand exhibition Progetto disequilibrante in Triennale Design Museum in Milan in 2014/15. It is exactly the plane of disequilibrated systems which is La Pietra's constant preoccupation that seems most interesting to us, representing the axis of exhibitions in Zagreb and Split in organization of grey)(area with partners. However, let us emphasize that the Croatian audience already had the opportunity to make acquaintance with La Pietra's work: he took part in the 2nd International Visual Artists Meeting in Vela Luka in 1970, and in 1975 he had a solo exhibition in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. 
 

The trajectory of La Pietra's artistic development commenced in the late 1950s with symbolical experiments in painting, which he nominated sign painting, during his studies at the Polytechnic University of Milan, where he graduated in architecture in 1964. The first significant conceptual milestone in La Pietra's career is displayed by his work The House for the Sculptor. In his own words, that was the work that inscribed him within the area of radical architecture and that position was confirmed when he was invited by the curator Emilio Ambasz to take part in the famous exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in MoMA, New York and for which La Pietra conceptualized the work Domestic Cell.
 

He builds to deconstruct, says Angela Rui. La Pietra's theory and practice of disequilibrated systems allows individuals and communities to distinguish and earn ‘degrees of freedom’ in order to ‘live’ and not just ‘use’ (or consume) a city.

With his work, La Pietra confirms that the space within which we live and act is not more than the physical embodiment of power, and his need to deliver to society not so much an object but a method is to be read from the inexhaustible editorial work, but also from research, analysis and synthesis of the relations between peripheries and centres, as well as from the series of works that deal with re-appropriation of the city by its inhabitants.

La Pietra also described possible coastal interventions, where he collaborated on programme development of Plitvine bay near Vela Luka in 1972,  as disequilibrated interventions. He thought that the fundamental desire of an urban man in a tourist settlement was to find space for collective creation, and he recognized the needs of a tourist for privacy, service, freedom, creativity and communication. His project proposed a spatial model for transforming the Dalmatian littoral landscape, which he presented at the accompanying symposium titled  Emergenze urbane – Proposte per la Costa dalmata. The project is a continuation of his research Nodi Urbani, started in 1965. The proposal included a radical land-art intervention of cutting the top of a nearby islet, which is very similar to the project by Ivan Kožarić, who cut the top of a mountain but from another conceptual perspective. 
 

La Pietra's films are another form of modulating synesthetic thinking and decoding the urban. Paletti e catene (1979) pinpoints, in a humorous way, the possible improvement of urban furniture (which, at that time, already restricted movement with chains and stakes). La Riappropriazione della città emphasizes that the process of reappropriation of the city occurs via mental processes and not via physical spatial interventions. Per oggi basta! (Il Commutatore) performatively places the artist's own body in an urban space whereby, leaning it against a simply constructed device, he alternates the angle of observing and therefore creates a new perception of space.
 

Spazio reale/Spazio Virtuale (1979) is a signifier of the phase of work that put forward the changes of human relation towards space and memory which occurred by introducing computing into everyday life: After twenty years spent building relationships between internal and external, world and individual, home and city, that have been so close as to be osmotic, at the beginning of the 1980s, Ugo La Pietra's utopia seemed to magically become reality: the world entered into home.  Casa telematica was transformed for the presentation at the Milan Fair in 1982, and showed what we know well today – it is a dystopia, not a utopia.

La Pietra wrote already in 1983: The new domestic media will lead to a decrease of socialization, whether incidental or wanted, allowing you to perform a series of tasks without leaving your home. Will they lead to an increase in the isolation of individuals within the family? These are the questions that often come up in these times of racing towards new tools: the answer is in day-to-day practice, in new social stratification of information control and other factors. 

 

Curators of the exhibition: Darko Fritz and Sonja Leboš.

 

More about the exhibition at the grey) (area official web page: http://sivazona.en/