Calling home. Explorations on domestic change in Italy
14th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, September-November 2014



Calling home is a project on housing change in Italy and on the ways Italian society shapes its domestic spaces. It ideally turns back to some of the grand inquiries that were dedicated to Italy’s housing during the decades of dramatic urban transformation that followed WWII, such as Liliana Cavani’s La casa in Italia (1964-65), or Gianni Berengo Gardin and Luciano D’Alessandro’s Dentro le case (1978). It mostly focuses on the housing stock that was built during the same period, when many Italians achieved the status of homeowners.

The project consists in a series of 20 live video-interviews in which the interviewees are connected from their homes and are asked to talk about the spaces around them and their past and present experience of the building. Each interview covers a few recurrent topics related to house arrangements, accommodation and tenure, daily life experiences and the personal and collective memories attached to the place. The sample of interviewees represents a plurality of living situations from several Italian regions and addresses from a spatial perspective the social transformations underway.

Calling home will contribute to the section Weekend Specials of Monditalia at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, from September to November 2014.

Contrary to the usual practice of social sciences fieldwork, we do not enter the houses, but rather let the inhabitants invade the space of the Corderie. In most cases we may have to guess their domestic daily life from the few blurred details they choose to let us see: a bookshelf, a fridge, a table, a display case.

Visit the project website.