Ever since Palladio and Alberti - the first ones to use images in their treaties - it could be said that architecture somehow exists thanks to media and visual arts, which made it accessible and valuable beyond the limits of actual presence. For modern architects, photography played an even more crucial part, as a means not only to access buildings one wouldn’t see but also as an extremely flexible communication medium, as displayed in the intense post-production performed by Le Corbusier on his photos. Most recently architects have discovered the power of the moving image (virtual & real), intrigued by the endless potentials offered by a medium that allows for a deeper and accurate analysis of the built environment and more flexible, dynamic, and engaging design possibilities. Symmetrically video- and media-artists have recently turned their interest towards architecture, as a dense repository of ideology, spatial conflicts, consumption. It became an essential narrative tool in their works, sometimes becoming the main character in their stories.

The Architecture Film Summer School, promoted and organized by MAXXI, takes shape starting from the growing recognition of this exciting contamination between languages and art forms which aim to develop new expressive tools and knowledge shared in the younger generation of architects and video artists. The program will include a series of conferences, meetings with artists, and workshops aimed at creating short architectural video works and it will take place digitally on an online platform to be defined. The group of participants - composed of architects and video artists - will have the opportunity to explore the art of video making as a new way of investigating, questioning, and reflecting on this year's theme: the connection between gender and space.

In fall 2021 MAXXI will present BUONE NUOVE (“Good News”) an exhibition that aspires to document how architecture has been affected by and benefitted from social changes and battles for inclusivity and equality through the presence of new professional figures that are infusing new forces in contemporary design. The presence of previously absent or much more marginal figures at the helm of the project teams has in fact led to redefine the objectives and tools of architecture in relation to renewed concepts of creativity and innovation. The exhibition will therefore pay particular attention to the work of offices directed or co-directed by women designers and to those professional bodies that prove to be more aware of the bio-political changes taking place, integrating them into their designing process.

While the exhibition focuses on the new gender alignments within the architecture practice, the Architecture Film Summer School will be a tool to explore the other side of the story: can gender identity be a way to experience and define space? Can space, both public and private, be “gendered”? Does gender influence or fails to influence the space we live in and the way we design it? How does the connection between gender and space influence the way we perceive it?

Theme: Gender&Space

Tutor: Jasmina Cibic

2021 MAXXI Architecture Film Summer School is organised together with BINA/Future Architecture Platform Film Summer School, 2021 CAFx Summer School and the Oslo Architecture Triennial (OAT).

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