Videos, installations, sound works, photographs, optical and light devices compose the stages of an exploration of natural and urban landscapes – historical centers and peripheries – to depict the contemporary social universe, identifying unexpected places, images, narrations, emotional tones. ZimmerFrei dives into the present to unearth its complexities, its shadows, its layerings of times and spaces, its histories, its symbolic force.

The exhibition is announced from the outside by a neon sign playing on the group’s name (German for “free rooms”): an invitation to discovery, through a spyhole allowing the public to peep at what’s inside the museum. In the hallway, four monitors show videos from the Panorama series: Rome, Bologna, Athens and Harburg are the cities depicted in suggestive and unexpected ways, through a particular time-lapse shooting technique allowing to “compress” a whole day within a bunch of minutes. In the main space a big net, the exhibition’s barycenter, is hanging: Radura, a device conceived to capture within its meshes an imaginary landscape, creating a sound environment composed of interlaced feelings and thoughts.

The exhibition path further develops with some photographic works, including two groups of images that the public is free to arrange as they wish: the former (Tomorrow is the question) shot on the Brooklyn beach of Coney Island, in southern New York, in front of the fabulous architectures of an old Luna Park; the latter (I giorni del cane) in the extreme periphery of Rome, where shepherds and sheep become symbols of an impossible conciliation of archaic times and a degraded present. The projection of the documentary film LKN Confidential composes an unprecedented portrait of a Brussels street, rue de Laeken, intertwining the personal stories of those who work there and of casual passerbys: the city is seen as a cruel and wonderful setting, where every encounter becomes a revelation. A somewhat harsher perspective on contemporary life emerges from the reel recorder of Senza titolo (di un dio minore), a phone tapping transformed into an x-ray of power relations.

With these and the other exhibited works (among which the What we do is secret stereoscope and Fino all’orlo colmi di figure, a huge double-face photograph mounted on a cart), ZimmerFrei invite us to become aware of the labyrinthine nature of reality, of its contradictions, of the unexplored richness hiding within it. Today, the artists seem to say, we are increasingly faced with the necessity of reading the world “against the grain”, confronting it with a demanding and attentive gaze, ready to grasp the most elusive symptoms, the small everyday epiphanies in which we can find traces of our shared belonging to the present time.

Three public events take place during ZimmerFrei’s exhibition, in June, July and August respectively.

The ZimmerFrei campo | largo exhibition is supported by Premio Terna 03, as the artists have been awarded the AMACI Museums Special Prize in the Megawatt category.