VENICE.- As part of the initiatives accompanying the 11th Biennale International Architecture Exhibition, the Giorgio Cini Foundation has organised the exhibition Fratelli d'Italia (“Brothers of Italy” – the title of the Italian national anthem). This show is the outcome of a project by the German artist Matthias Schaller, conceptually based on the analogy between political ideology and architecture. The project involved photographing 150 opera houses throughout the Italian regions from 2005 to 2008.

Inspired by the stages in Goethe’s Italian Journey from Trento to Agrigento and with the aim of calling into question German stereotypes of Italy by producing photographic documentation of the country, Schaller chose for a theme the architectural style of Italian opera houses. In fact the opera houses were mainly built at a time when the unity of Italy was being highlighted in various ways, including styles of architecture. The artist sees the opera houses as a kind of official icon concealing umpteen cultural and human differences and symbolising the spread of architectural uniformity driven by political-cultural intentions. In this serial show, Schaller thus introduces parallels between the political project to unify Italy and the intensive spate of opera house building throughout the country.

The artist explains: “My initial aim was to portray Italy, not empirically but metaphorically. When photographing the 150 Italian-style opera houses, I realised that they provided a self-portrait of the country with an architectural uniformity, which does not reflect, to my mind, the cultural, social and political reality from the 19th century to the present day. The exhibition sets out to compare foreigners’ observations about Italy and the way that Italy represents its own, only apparently ‘unitary’, identity”.

By using the images of opera houses seen from the same viewpoint for the purposes of comparison, Schaller invites the onlooker to think critically about Italian identity. The portrait of places characterised by operatic masquerade is transformed into the metaphorical representation of Italy, while the allusion to the first line of the Italian national anthem in the exhibition title ironically informs the onlooker’s gaze as it wanders from one opera house to another.