La Casa Dentro
ICA, 2024
‘La Casa Dentro’ (The Home Within) is a solo exhibition by Formafantasma curated by Alberto Salvadori at Fondazione ICA Milano¹. The body of work specifically developed for this exhibition, comprise of a series of furniture and light objects that explore themes of personal identity and collective memory.
The works critically addresses the canons of Modernism, highlighting its gendered nature and rootedness in a conservative understanding of masculinity. Modernism developed in the early 20th-century in parallel to the industrial innovations and as a condemnation of the ‘effeminate’ traits of nineteenth-century eclecticism.
Architects such Adolf Loos and Henry van de Velde advocated for simplicity, authenticity, and integrity, contrasting these sober, rational and ‘virile’ qualities with the sentimentality and ornamentation associated with previous styles.
Formafantasma’s work departs from a staple of the Modernist furniture making, the bent tubular metal, to closely examine the tension between the lived experience of domesticity - one made of humble handmade objects and decorative items - and the intellectual understanding of Modernist ideologies of architecture and design.
The exhibited objects juxtapose rational, almost surgical compositions of curved steel with wooden planks adorned with hand embroideries, painted floral patterns, and silk volants, referencing the designers’ childhood memories of home.
The body of work while being extremely personal, is an attempt to queer the codes of Modernist design and sees the process of being professionally educated as the inevitable imposition of a canon.
La Casa Dentro is a meditation on memory, nostalgia for what is lost and the impossibility to fully un-learn.
