La Facciata

2017 · Milan · Photography, 16mm film, and textile

La Facciata is a multimedia installation combining photography, 16mm film, and textile elements that examines the interior of Villa Necchi Campiglio, a modernist mansion in Milan built in the 1930s and now preserved as a museum-house.

Through a film projection, a large-scale mural, and a series of photographs, the work explores the shifting meanings of the villa as it moves between private residence and public institution. Once a family home, it now exists as a carefully maintained historical space where architecture, design, and objects remain, while the lives that once animated them have disappeared.

At the center of the installation is a 16mm film in which the villa's caretaker quietly dusts its furnishings, sculptures, and decorative objects. This repeated act of maintenance becomes both practical and performative, momentarily reanimating a house preserved in suspension. The furnishings seem to retain the presence of their former inhabitants, even as they function as museum artifacts.

La Facciata considers how architecture preserves memory while transforming lived experience into display. Through the camera's slow movement across interiors and objects, the villa becomes a cinematic space suspended between history and imagination, where the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the domestic and the institutional, remain deliberately uncertain. Rather than recovering the past, the work examines how institutions continually stage it in the present.

Installation views

Video stills

Special thanks: J-f Lesage, Bogdan Stoica, Fred St-Hilaire, Chloé Grondeau, Julia Autumn Savoy, Emili Dufour, Nicholas Pitre, Claude Fortaich, Noemie da Silva, Caroline Savaria, Thomas Kneubühler, Yan Giguère, Peter King, Natacha Chamko, Anne-Marie Groulx, Julie Simoneau, Yann Pocreau, Rina Sfalcin, Simone Viola, Stefania Peterlini, Diagonale, Atelier Clark, Centre SAGAMIE, L'imprimerie, centre d'artistes, Niagara Custom Lab, Maison des métiers d'art de Québec, Fondo Ambiente Italiano (FAI), British School at Rome, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ).