L'ERA
gallery
“What? Yet another women’s revolt?” - Lo Shopping a Luleå
This exhibition-performance brings to light the events of one of the masterpieces
less considered than post-World War II Swedish architecture, the first Shopping Mall in the world built for this purpose.
the event, in particular, focuses on how this building has been experienced and modified by the game of social reorganization, so much so as to make it the protagonist of intense discussions on the redefinition of gender identity.
exhibition curated by Stefano Tornieri, Roberto Zancan, Cecilia Zavagno
In an essay, famous for having redefined the relationship between feminism and architecture, Mary McLeod pointed out that Foucault, in articulating the concept of heterotopia "seems to have expressed an unconscious contempt for aspects of everyday life such as the house, the public park and department stores, which were instead provinces where women found not only
oppression, but also a certain degree of comfort, security, autonomy and even freedom.”
The backdrop to this exhibition is a work by the English, naturalized Swedish architect Ralph Erskine, called Shopping, inaugurated in September 1955 in Luleå, a town on the edge of the Arctic Circle where the majority of the population of Norrbotten is concentrated.
With its position hardly
reachable, this building was poorly considered by architectural critics, who were interested in it only to point it out as something it wasn't: the first shopping mall in history. Despite
of the name, the building is in fact rather similar to a passage, a commercial gallery without underground parking and car access, located
in the heart of the city.
The importance of the building, however, did not escape the director Mai Zetterling - the first female director to win a post-war direction award at the Venice Film Festival with the short film War Game (1962) - who set the decisive sequences of Flickorna there (The Girls, 1968), a milestone in the promotion of a culture of parity and equality between the sexes (from which the joke that gives the exhibition its title is taken).
By contrasting the screening of this cinematic transposition of Aristophanes' Lysistrata with the transfigurations of promotional and documentary images preserved in the archives which in various capacities restore the past of the commercial gallery, the exhibition intends to make explicit the contestation
to the stereotyped image of the "Swedish woman" that established itself on the international scene, and more particularly in that of Italian cinema, starting from the end of the 1950s.
To become aware, physically and physically, of how much the architecture of Shopping has been and continues to be a field of comparison and redefinition of gender identity, those who visit the exhibition will have the concrete possibility of tracing the complex internal atrium and compare it
directly with figurines, sketches and human representations of the time, giving life to the performance of a real "animated view".