Giovanna Silva. Mr Bawa I presume
EXHIBITION
Thursday, 23 May , 18:30
curated by CAMPO
in collaboration with Leporello Books
CAMPO presents a work by the architect and photographer Giovanna Silva on the architecture of Geoffrey Manning Bawa, one of the most influent Asian architects of his generation.
In his long and prestigious career Bawa has been a forerunner of what is globally known as Tropical Modernism, “an architecture that is a blend of both modern and traditional, east and west, formal and picturesque, disrupting the walls between inside and outside, building and landscape, offering a blueprint of new ways to live and work in a tropical city.” Bawa tailored modern buildings to a specific environment.
“I start to take picture while the world still asleep; I manage to immerse the buildings in a suspended dimension. They seem inhabited, a part from the trace left by people the day before. The result is a photo of unclean architecture, apparently inanimate but instead dotted with objects testifying the secret life of architecture.”
The title of the exhibition, “Mr Bawa, I suppose”, comes from the inner dialogue which takes place every time the author is in front of one of Geoffrey Manning Bawa buildings.
In her photographs Silva explores the fleeting edge where different worlds meet. Along these lines of accidental collision, the architectural language withdraws and gives way to places slowly shaped between our memory and vision. Focusing on the results that this collision produces, Giovanna Silva provides us an unusual perspective on architecture and landscape.
She is the editor of Humboldt Books.