VAenezia, May 12th. (askanews) – Perhaps it is difficult to imagine that an exhibition dedicated to maps and diagrams can be something truly fascinating and aesthetically powerful, something that in a certain way offers a more lucid and articulated image of the world. Yet exactly this happens with the “Diagrams” exhibition in the Prada Foundation in Venice, a journey into the visual communication of data as a device capable of building sense, understanding or manipulation and as a pervasive tool to analyze, understand and transform the world.
“Diagrams” on display in the Prada Foundation in Venice
Conceived and edited by the AMO/OMA study, founded by Rem Koolhaas, the exhibition wants to promote dialogue and speculative reflection on the relationship between human intelligence, scientific and cultural phenomena and the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Within elegant display cases, whose structure resumes that of the diagrams in a sort of game of mirrors, there are over 300 objects, including rare documents, publications, digital images and videos made from the twelfth century to today and relating to different cultural and geographical contexts.
Some of them are of evident aesthetic beauty, others express a high level of complexity, still others have an almost visionary essentiality. But everyone puts us in front of the fact that the data, measurements and diagrams, in the end, describe exactly our lives and macroscopic processes that regulate them.
Organized according to a thematic principle that wants to reflect the emergencies of the contemporary world, the documents exposed tell nine main themes: built environment, health, inequality, migration, natural environment, resources, war, truth and value. And they very often use the axis of the time in an extremely interesting way, which is revealed in its profound and mysterious nature of super entity that the diagrams, in some way, succeed, if not fully understanding, at least to convey.
I woman © RESERVED REPRODUCTION