Padania Classics
curated by Daniele de Luigi and Carlo Sala
Padania Classics, which later became a book entitled Atlante dei Classici Padani, is a documentation and conceptualization project of the northern Italian landscape.
Started in 2011 the multidisciplinary visual research project aims to identify the “Padania classics” in the field of aesthetics, architecture, and human behaviour, using the techniques of business and territorial marketing through a variety of channels (installations, performance events, online initiatives) and using irony and paradox as instruments to expose the real outcomes of political and business action, telling about the people through their actions and never showing them as photographic subjects.
The precise intent of the project is to document the contemporary architectural landscape, intentionally omitting natural landscapes and historical heritage, displaying what the latest generations have produced on a vast scale since the ’80s to the present day, tracing the experience, the choices, and thus the landscape of the last 50 years.
Developing methodically and cataloguing the succession and the commingling of industrial, residential, commercial, and agricultural areas that make up the territory that extends from the western Alps to the Adriatic Sea, Padania Classics frames the aesthetic of the landscape and the features common to the territory, analysing the “savage” socio-architectural evolutions of a vastly populated area of Northern Italy, which Eugenio Turri identified in the early 2000s with the publication of his book La megalopoli padana.
