Item Description
This is the catalogue from the exhibition held at the Museu Inimá de Paula (MIP), Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 2014.
Curator and scenography Ricardo Fernandes
Text by contemporary art journalist and critic Pascale Lismonde.
“Lucia Adverse and the film ‘Metropolis’.
I watched this masterpiece again. To my surprise Lucia Adverse’s ‘Der Sturm’ series seems to be the urban universe of ‘Metropolis’ incarnate, as if, in modern Berlin, she really had found the buildings of the city designed by Fritz Lang nearly a century ago, as in a future visitation of those chosen for 2026, constructed day and night by robotic and completely servile workers. In Lucia Adverse’s photographs there also arise these enormous buildings with rectangular cavities, side by side, totally dark, sometimes vertical, sometimes horizontal. It’s as if the science fiction city had taken modern concrete form in Berlin, exactly as Fritz Lang imagined it.
However, on closer observation of the photography, ‘Metropolis’ appears more as a reference, a point of departure for her exploratory work, different from what Lucia Adverse presents to us, which is not really a vertical urban area where twin-engine planes fly around, but rather, isolated edifices or fragments of architecture, photographed one by one.
The twenty-three photographs of ‘Der Sturm’ really reveal a sampling of the urban history of Berlin in all its moments of local architecture, especially because the artist shows us not the prestigious architecture of the city’s most well-known buildings, but the everyday buildings, offices, ordinary houses or simple dwellings. A small ancient house with walls covered in ivy and a tree in the yard, a large façade with post baroque details, a popular construction in the modernist Bauhaus 1930’s style with its architectural entrance, an erstwhile town hall or Jewish commune featuring a gateway with four small lateral domes, a series of modern concrete facades, factories or office buildings typical of the last decades of the 20th century, and of course the above mentioned building of fifteen floors and its spectacular immensity.”
(extract from text by Pascale Lismonde)
