Cantieri di Gadda. Il groviglio della Totalità  

SUMMER CLOSURE FROM 1-31 AUGUST 2024 - RE-OPENING MONDAY 2.9.2024

Opening 13/06/2024 to 11/10/2024 from 10 am to 7 pm (Saturday and Sunday closed and closed all August)

Speakers

• Donatella Sciuto, Rector of the Politecnico di Milano
• Francesco Svelto, Rector University of Pavia
• Andrea Campioli, Dean of the AUIC School
• Stefano Capolongo, Director of the ABC Department
• Massimo Bricocoli, Director of DaStU Department
• The exhibition curators

Curated by the Gadda Study Centre: guided exhibition tour with a reading of some passages by Emilio Gadda.

The exhibition Cantieri di Gadda, conceived by the Gadda Study Centre of the University of Pavia in collaboration with the School of Architecture of the Politecnico di Milano, will be hosted in the Guido Nardi exhibition space of the Politecnico (via Ampère 2, Milan) from 12 June to 11 October 2024.

As the culmination and crowning achievement of the initiatives linked to the 50th anniversary of the death of Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973), the exhibition intends to guide the public through the workshop of the most excellent prose writer of the 20th century, transforming into a visual itinerary the paths and adventures of a writing style in which technical-scientific knowledge, literature and philosophy coexist surprisingly.

The originality of the exhibition lies not only in the wealth of books, papers and manuscripts on display for the first time but also in the decision to place the writer in his world, in dialogue with the places of his life, the cities, rooms, friendships, furniture and objects and utensils that, together with volumes, magazines and images, defined the environment in which Gadda thought and worked.

The visitor thus enters Gadda's spaces, both historical and geographical: that of the young Alpine soldier, fervent volunteer in the Great War; the Milan of the engineering student, mercilessly portrayed in the splendid stories of Adalgisa - which is evoked not only by a rich collection of magazines and objects but becomes passable thanks to an interactive map that displays streets, buildings, places of the Engineer; the Rome of the Pasticciaccio, disfigured by the hated figure of the Duce, a city-world in which the visitor is invited to immerse himself through videos, photographs, propaganda posters, newspapers and periodicals that, together with books and documents, illuminate the genesis of the novel.
A section of the exhibition is dedicated to the splendidly adventurous history of Gadda's language: the exhibits reconstruct its external stimuli and compositional processes: the vicissitudes of words, inventions, and contaminations; readings and encounters that helped shape the uniqueness of each page that emerged from a glowing construction site.
Gadda's human and literary vicissitudes are thus intertwined in an immersive journey that stages the writer at work - in the places of his work - revealing his workshop secrets.

Curated by
Mariarosa Bricchi, Paola Italia, Marco Malagodi, Giorgio Pinotti, Claudio Vela (Gadda Study Centre)
Roberto Dulio, Massimo Ferrari, Claudia Tinazzi (DABC, Milan Polytechnic)
with
Sofia Andreoli, Annalucia D'Erchia, Daniela Mori

Installation
Massimo Ferrari, Claudia Tinazzi, Annalucia D'Erchia, with Daniela Mori (DABC, Politecnico di Milano)

Interactive map
Matilde Passafaro, Alessia Vezzoni

Photographs
Marco Introini

Video
Roberto Dassoni

Organisational secretariat
Sofia Andreoli

Guided tours open to the city will be provided during the exhibition's opening period and open to schools of all levels starting in September.

More info and registration at the opening: Exhibition "Cantieri di Gadda. Il groviglio della Totalità" - Eventi del Politecnico di Milano (polimi.it)