Ugo La Pietra

The film is ironic about the lack of actions for transforming city spaces; the few actions undertaken are almost always limited to the positioning of “poles and chains”: the temporary signs of a hypothetical transformation on the city. The film shows sequences of innumerable “pole and chain” barriers, commented on by architects, councillors, members of activity groups… who all underline the impermanence of these objects in view of some “elusive” transformations of the city.

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The film tries to demonstrate the way to regain possession of the city not so much with physical interventions but with behavioral and mental operations. "To live is to be at home everywhere: the phrase, almost a carousel slogan, opens the film as you start a poster, a sort of password to which the smiling face of Ugo La Pietra - all intent on the street making the beard reflected in the glass doors of a large door - offers the evidence of the images. Cinema for La Pietra becomes an indispensable means for analyzing and decoding the environment, recording the traces of an original creative activity, dismantling and reassembling the topoi of urban architecture, creating behavioral indications capable of giving life to "one's" city . (...) ". (Paolo Mereghetti, 1977).

The film, shot ‘inside and outside’ Milan’s central station, uses this particular architecture as a model for discovering that within the environment we inhabit and work in, there almost never exists a relationship between space and its use. It pinpoints the ‘detachment’ which means expressing one’s own critical attitude towards the kind of architecture that refuses to accept any ‘vital’ aspects but reduces itself to a ‘monumental structure’ that is not able to contain the dynamics of human relationships.

Among the protagonists of this film, made for the sixteenth Milan Triennial exhibition “Lo spazio audiovisivo”, were Gau Aulenti, Vittorio Gregotti, Andrea Branzi, Bruno Munari, Nanda Vigo, Virgilio Vercelloni, Enzo Mari, Gianfranco Bettetini, Aldo Grassi, Costantino Bardi, Alessandro Mendini, Pierluigi Nicolin, Gillo Dorfles, Davide Mosconi… interviewed by Ugo La Pietra, who then transferred their statements onto a large “diagram of objectives”.

The film was made with successive images of La Pietra’s face realised from 1938 to 1974, all continually compared with his face as was at that moment (1974). Through this sequence we have the sensation that for thirty-six years he has doggedly and slowly tried to reach some “final model” (his face in 1974).

The film expresses the difficulties artists come up against whenever they try out ‘paths’ that are outside the ‘system’. All this is represented through this project and, therefore, through the realisation and use of a tool (Il Commutatore, 1970) with which it is possible, in successive phases, to supersede the physicality of the city and to project oneself towards the ‘void’.

Made on the occasion of the XV Triennale di Milano, the film was shot inside the Triennale which, empty, expresses the tension and expectation of an artist in front of his "big opportunity", finally called to express himself through a great exhibition in an institutional venue.