Camera Balla 2021

The work of Space Popular, a design and architecture studio founded by Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg in 2013, occupies a territory somewhere between real and virtual space and sees one constantly blend into the other. Their continual experimentation with technology translates visual styles and patterns in every area of research into an eclectic flow that goes from the physical to the digital, creating mixed universes as places of interaction and sharing. Space Popular investigates the architecture of the real world, working with companies on the design of buildings, furniture, and interiors, and the architecture of the virtual world, imagining new experiential spaces on the occasion of invitations to exhibitions, festivals, and biennials around the planet.

Space Popular’s research is fluid and explores the whole of the immersive web (also known as the Metaverse), holding a futuristic dialogue with Giacomo Balla’s total work of art: through experimentations on dynamism and simultaneity of spaces and events, the interest in the popular, the use of decoration and color, and, again, the Futurist imagination and its creation of new worlds. Drawing on the practice of gaming, Space Popular constructs interactive spatial experiences that “explode in all their richness and variety.”

Camera Balla is a virtual artwork and a film together. Its title alludes to the rooms of Via Oslavia conceived by Balla to live as well as to store art, but also to the photographic camera as a documentation device of two-dimensional visual information: with Camera Balla the visitor is taken on a virtual tour of its interior in which the perspective of spherical photography, used by Balla as a means of investigating movement, creates a landscape made up of spherical rooms and planets in the making. In Space Popular’s inedited work, Casa Balla is a space to be discovered voyeuristically along with other visitors, a place where the collective experience of the Ballian cosmos is multiplied.

Casa Balla From The House To The Universe And Back

For the first time, the extraordinary Futurist house in Rome where Giacomo Balla lived and worked from 1929 until his death is open to the public.

For thirty years, Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) transformed the entire family home into a veritable work of art. A laboratory of experimentation made up of painted walls, a myriad of furniture, furnishings, decorated utensils, numerous paintings and sculptures, clothes he designed and many other objects that together created a unique and kaleidoscopic total project.

In addition to the Roman house’s opening to the public, the project includes a major thematic exhibition hosted in MAXXI’s spectacular galleria 5. On display are new works conceived and created for the occasion that reflects on the numerous suggestions of Casa Balla, a real piece of art, bringing out the profound topicality of the multifaceted master’s thought.

Invited to investigate Casa Balla are international artists and creatives – Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine, Carlo Benvenuto, Alex Cecchetti, Jim Lambie, Emiliano Maggi, Leonardo Sonnoli, Space Popular and Cassina with Patricia Urquiola – whose productions meet some important loans from Giacomo Balla inside the gallery space.