Search History sets out to explore the work of Also Rossi and to translate his notions of “urban fact” and “analogous city” to the virtual realm. The installation is a reflection on the proliferation of spatial media platforms and the concept of virtual urbanism.
Type: Solo Exhibition / Installation
Exhbited: 2022 7th December – 2023 14th January
MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Rome ,Italy
Solo Exhibition: Space Popular: Search History
Curtor: Domitilla Dardi
Team: Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg.
Modeling and Research Assistant: Deborah Wong.
Creative Partner: Alcantara
Soundscape: San Jerónimo (María Mieres and Nacho Iglesias)
Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield. Musacchio, Ianniello, Pasqualini & Fucilla, courtesy Fondazione MAXXI.
Video Documentation: Bad Toast Production
Fabricator: Articolarte
Selected Press / Reviews / Articles / Essays
Koozarch / Enrique Aureng Silva
Interni Magazine / Claudia Foresti
Dezeen / Amy Frearson
Elle Decor / Lessia Musillo
Wallpaper /Martha Elliott
CieloTerra / Ludovica Proietti
Stir World / Aaryaa Joshi
FRAME Magazine / Lauren Grace Morris
Archdaily / Maria-Cristina Florian
Related Work
2022 - Immersive Film - The Global Home
2019 - Writing - Who owns the global home?
Space Popular. Search History. MAXXI, Rome, Italy. Photography: MatthewBlunderfield
SEARCH HISTORY: Browsing through the Virtual City
Social virtual reality platforms (socialVR) are the origins of the now so-called metaverse: networks of online virtual environments where people represented by avatars can come together to converse, exchange information and goods, play games and sports, etc. There are hundreds of socialVR platforms to date, each of them with their own features, regulations, and business models. Some platforms offer an open space in which to build worlds, games, and experiences to socialise within. Some are multiplayer games so large, complex, and demanding that communities form and grow within them. Others are real estate companies selling land in virtual cities with no community in sight. This last kind commonly refers to themselves as metaverses, and have multiplied in the past two years. To date, most of these platforms recreate the existing real estate market by means of artificial scarcity: laying out virtual cities on maps that emulate physical city patterns and zoning so that the value of virtual land can be subject to speculation that mirrors the capitalist real estate market. In virtual environments we circulate and organise space without the constraints of physical distance or boundaries, which renders common indicators of value, such as size or location, meaningless. This also means that the virtual city does not need to feature known elements such as street and sidewalks, metro lines, or a centre vs. periphery model. Instead, virtual urbanism concerns the protocols that enable us to teleport instantly between virtual environments, to browse and bookmark them, and to stroll back through our history or delete it.
Elements such as portals, elevators, teleporters, and even menus and buttons are the roads, sidewalks, and public transport of the virtual city. The virtual mobility infrastructure is unique to each of us: it shapes itself around us and we are alone in it. This brings to question the long standing idea of urban infrastructure as public space and a civic endeavour, not only because we experience these spaces alone, but also because as of now all of them are provided and managed by private for-profit entities.
In Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City, the urban environment is defined as an accumulation of “urban facts”: buildings loaded with history and meaning. Rather than looking at the city through a map, a grid, or a pattern of roads and tracks, Rossi presents us with a notion of urbanism that embraces the subjective experience over time: the city is a sequence of spatial experiences that, while being unique to each one of us, remains ‘permanent, universal and a necessary fact’. Each of us experiences the city in a unique way, however the city itself remains a collective certainty. The virtual city is more akin to this than what any of the so-called metaverse platforms have proposed so far. We do not experience the virtual city in parallel to a map that looks the same to us all, but as a trail of experiences unique to each one of us, and constantly being rebuilt and rearranged as we navigate it. The virtual city is more comparable to our search history on a browser than to a city map.
Search History presents the experience of moving across virtual environments in the immersive internet through a teleportation infrastructure made of virtual Alcantara sheets. Composed of two rings, the piece portrays a series of virtual portals on the outside, and on the inside a multilayered cityscape which shows the historical overlay of a place. In between the two rings a browsing corridor is formed, containing a palimpsest of menus, pop-ups, links, and tabs that would be inscribed in the soft infrastructure for the immersive internet.
The kinetic structure rotates to the rhythm of an original soundscape composed and produced by Spanish music duo San Jeronimo, creating an audio visual experience that portrays the multi-layered dynamism and cacophony of the virtual city.
Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg 2022
The circular installation rotates to the rhythm of an original 40 minute long soundscape composed and produced by Spanish music duo San Jeronimo (María Mieres and Nacho Iglesias), creating an audio visual experience that portrays the multi-layered dynamism and cacophony of the virtual city.
Space Popular. Search History is part of
Alcantara-MAXXI Studio Visit programme
For five years, the Studio Visit programme has been inviting contemporary designers to offer a personal interpretation of the work of one of the masters represented in the MAXXI Architettura Collection.
For the latest edition, Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, directors of the architecture and art studio Space Popular, have been chosen to explore the work of Aldo Rossi, one of the most internationally influential Italian architects of the twentieth century. The two architects take Rossi’s notions of the “urban fact” (fatto urbano) and the “analogous city” (città analoga) as a basis for how we collectively make the virtual city.
Reflecting on the recent proliferation of so-called metaverse platforms that aim to recreate existing real-estate market models by selling virtual land, Space Popular proposes instead a civic approach to virtual urbanism. Search History presents the experience of moving across virtual environments in the Immersive Internet (which is the only, ever-shifting, unmappable, metaverse) through a tribute to Rossi. A multilayered annular structure transforms to the rhythm of an original soundscape composed and produced by Spanish music duo San Jeronimo.
In continuous movement, the Alcantara sheets immerse us in a soft and shifting architecture whose flowing movement constantly composes new landscapes, looking beyond the physical limit of the material and providing a glimpse at new perspectives. Alcantara supports this reading through crossing boundaries, lending itself to daring cuts, unique prints, and rich textures. Rossi himself was attracted to the chromatic possibilities of Alcantara during the 1980s when the company hired him to design a small theatre, which remains unbuilt. Rossi was struck by this material, “between ancient and future that, in its perfection and colours, concealed behind traditional draperies and colours, green, blue and yellow”.
Space Popular has often presented virtual environments with little or no digital means, as they understand that digital screens or headsets are just the latest iterations of virtual reality hardware with precedents such as frescoes or tapestries that date back hundreds of years and that remind us that tactility remains the most important companion to audio-visual experiences.