Prada S p A : FONDAZIONE PRADA PRESENTS DAY OF STUDY “INSIDE THE MACHINES” AT ITS VENICE VENUE

FONDAZIONE PRADA PRESENTS DAY OF STUDY "INSIDE THE MACHINES" AT ITS VENICE VENUE ON 4 OCTOBER 2018

Venice, 2 October 2018 - Fondazione Prada presents "Inside the Machines: a symposium devoted toMachines à penser: Architecture, Art, Philosophy" on Thursday 4 October 2018 from 10am to 4.30pm at its Venetian venue, Ca' Corner della Regina. The day of study is originated from the exhibition "Machines à penser", curated by Dieter Roelstraete, and on view in Venice until 25 November 2018. Access to the conference is free and includes the admission to the exhibition on 4 October.

Speakers of "Inside the Machines" include: Iñaki Abalos, Spanish architect and architecture critic; Michael Nedo, Director of the Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge; Susan Philipsz, Scottish artist and recipient of the 2010 Turner Prize, whose sound installation is included in "Machine à penser"; Mark Riley, English artist, writer and Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Roehampton, London, who has displayed three works in the exhibition; Dieter Roelstraete, curator of Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago; Adam Sharr, Head of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the Newcastle University, London; Thomas Wallgren, Finnish philosopher and director of The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives, Helsinki.

The objective of this one-day discursive event is to bring together representatives from the three fields that intersect in the "Machines à penser" project-artists, architects, philosophers-to discuss the exhibition's core concern-recalibrating the relationship between thought and place, between insight and isolation-against the broader backdrop of some of the project's underlying "political" preoccupations: exile and flight, the attention/distraction economy, refuge and shelter, belonging and homelessness.

As Roelstraete explains, "Having built the exhibition around the life stories of Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, we are looking to achieve a critical approach able to take into account both Heideggerian and Wittgensteinian perspectives, all the while keeping in mind our interest in having the outcomes of our conference address contemporary topics in art, architecture, culture and further afield."

The exhibition "Machines à penser" explores the correlation between conditions of exile, escape and retreat and physical or mental places which favor reflection, thought and intellectual production, focusing on three major philosophers of the 20thcentury: Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). The latter two shared a life-long need for intellectual isolation: Heidegger spent long periods of his life in a secluded hut in the village of Todtnauberg in the Black Forest in Germany, whilst Wittgenstein retreated on several occasions to a small mountain cabin situated in a fjord in Skjolden, Norway. Adorno, on the other hand, was forced into exile from his native Germany during by the Nazi regime, first to Oxford and then to Los Angeles, where he wroteMinima Moralia, a collection of aphorisms that, among other themes, reflects on the fate of forced emigration. These reflections from the background to an installation conceived by the Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay in 1987 titledAdorno's Hut, a centerpiece of the exhibition alongside architectural reconstructions of the actual huts in which Heidegger and Wittgenstein wrote their respective masterpiecesBeing and Time(1927) andTractatus Logico-Philosophicus(1921). These replicas double as exhibition venues within the Ca' Corner della Regina, containing artworks and documents pertaining to the architectural archetype of the hut as a site of escape and retreat.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue edited by Dieter Roelstraete and published by Fondazione Prada. In addition to the curator's lead essay, the book's 500+ pages contain essays by Shumon Basar and Mark Riley, a long poem by Alec Finlay, and three conversations between artists Leonor Antunes, Alexander Kluge, Goshka Macuga and members of the curatorial department of Fondazione Prada.

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Speakers - biographical notes

Iñaki Abalosis a Doctorate Architect, founder and co-director of Abalos+Sentkiewicz, AS+, with offices in Madrid, Shanghai and Cambridge. He combines this activity with Research and Academia. Iñaki is currently Professor of Architectural Design at ETSAM, and Professor in Residence at Harvard GSD. His activity and work have been recognized worldwide in 15 solo exhibitions, multiple collective shows, 18 prizes to built work and 45 other prizes to his joint research and design work with Renata Sentkiewicz.

Michael Nedo,born 1940 Bautzen (East Germany), received a toolmaker apprenticeship. He studied mathematics and thereafter physics and zoology. In 1973 he contracted with Wittgenstein's heirs for a complete edition of Wittgenstein's writings. In 1975 he was nominated director of the Wittgenstein Archive at Tübingen University and Trinity College Cambridge. He is currently director of the Ludwig Wittgenstein Trust Cambridge and editor of Wittgenstein's writings in theWiener Ausgabe.He is also member of Clare Hall, a College for Advanced Study in the University of Cambridge.

Susan Philipsz, born in 1965 in Glasgow, is an artist who currently lives and works in Berlin. She received a BFA in Sculpture from Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee, Scotlandin 1993, and an MFA from the University of Ulster in Belfast in 1994. In 2000, she completed a fellowship at MoMA PS1 in New York. Recipient of the 2010 Turner Prize, the artist was also shortlisted for Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award that same year. Since the mid-1990s, Philipsz's sound installations have been exhibited at many prestigious institutions and public venues around the world such as Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2014), the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (2013), dOCUMENTA 13 (2012), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2011), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (2008), among others. She also conceived installations for the 2007 Skulptur Projekte in Muenster, Germany and for the Carnegie Museum of Art's 55th Carnegie International in 2008.

Mark Rileyis an artist, writer, and academic. He is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at University of Roehampton, London. Riley completed a PhD in Philosophy at Goldsmiths College (University of London) in 2005. He has contributed a chapter entitledDisorientation, Duration and TarkovskytoSchizoanalysis and Cinema, edited by Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack and published by Continuum in 2008. Most recently, he has exhibited the installation project, "Thinking Place - Reimagining Wittgenstein's Hut" at the Oxford House Gallery, London, in April 2016. He has also contributed a book chapter entitledPlace as Palimpsest: Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger and the Haunting of Todtnauberg'to the publicationHaunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment(part of the seriesPlace, Memory, Affect), edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing, and published by Rowman Littlefield International in November 2016.

Dieter Roelstraeteis curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. He was initially trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent in Belgium. Roelstraete served on the curatorial team convened by artistic director Adam Szymczyk to organize documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017. He was Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 2012 until 2015 and curator at the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA) in Belgium, from 2003 until 2011. Dieter Roelstraete has been a member of the Fondazione Prada's Thought Council since 2015.

Adam Sharris Professor of Architecture and Head of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University (UK). He is also Editor-in-Chief ofarq: Architectural Research Quarterly(Cambridge University Press), Series Editor of Thinkers for Architects (Routledge), and Principal of Adam Sharr Architects. His seven books about architecture and its histories and theories includeHeidegger's Hut(MIT Press, 2006) andHeidegger for Architects(Routledge, 2007). His next book,Modern Architecture: A Very Short Introduction,will be published by Oxford University Press in November. His practice work includes designs for houses, libraries, and learning spaces.

Thomas Wallgren, born in 1958, studied philosophy in Helsinki with Georg Henrik von Wright, student of Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein's successor as professor of philosophy at Cambridge, and in Frankfurt am Main with Jürgen Habermas, Adorno's professorialcolleague and close associate at Frankfurt in the 1960s. Wallgren is presently professor of philosophy and director of the von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki. He is also a social activist in the degrowth movement and chair of the board of the Brussels based think tank Corporate Europe Observatory. In 2011-2016 Wallgren was the chair of the board of the Helsinki Art Museum. Wallgren has published widely on the theory of modernity, ethics, aesthetics, Wittgenstein and the philosophy of philosophy. He is the author ofTransformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy(Lanham, 2006).