Young people and art will reinvigorate the suburbs


Tresoldi Academy promotes a creative-educational program to focus on the outskirts of Bologna and Modena. Applications open 27th April

Bologns, March 01, 2020 PRESS RELEASE

“The great project of our country is the suburbs: the city that will be, the city that we will leave to our children.” Renzo Piano.

In the year in which Senator Renzo Piano and his work group G124 have chosen Emilia, together with Palermo and Padua, as the national epicenter to reflect on the development and future of urban suburbs, an extraordinary opportunity is offered to the Tresoldi Academy: experimenting with the languages of art as a tool for renewing suburbs. Although they may seem impersonal and anonymous – but, maybe for this reason, familiar for the many people who live and pass through them- the suburbs are powerful places, an ideal scenario where a creative mind can express itself.

Tresoldi Academy is an innovative educational project recently conceived between Edoardo Tresoldi's STUDIO STUDIO STUDIO and YAC - Young Architects competitions, both international reference points for contemporary art and for architectural studies that has chosen to invite young talents to take part in a training course aimed at designing and producing site-specific installations inspired by the artistic language of Edoardo Tresoldi's works which will then be placed in the outskirts of Bologna and Modena.

From the collaboration between G124 and Tresoldi Academy, a series of workshop will be launched in July 2020: the aim is to transform the face of the Emilian suburbs with artistic installations that can bring beauty in often-marginal contexts and give identity to places that are often reduced to anonymity. Regenerated by art and transformed into a scenario for research and experimentation, the outskirts will become a laboratory and a model of urban rebirth for the entire national territory.

This project is also shared and supported by Urban Up, the real estate redevelopment project of Unipol Group, a player who has always shown great attention for the regeneration of urban suburbs and for the value of environmental sustainability. Already engaged in the enhancement of iconic buildings among its architectural properties in Milan, in Bologna - the city where the Group has its headquarters - Urban Up | Unipol wants to participate in the common goal of generating value through art. For this reason, the Group made available to G124 one of their areas - located close to Porta Europa, the Group’s headquarters - that is currently disused so that this can become a space for research and innovation where the aspiring artists or talented architects of the Tresoldi Academy can express theirselves.

The workshop - scheduled from 13th to 20th July 2020 – will take place in Bologna, Modena and Milan. After the first day of site-visits in Emilia, the participants will move to Edoardo Tresoldi’s Milan studio to begin working on the projects that will be developed during the intensive week and installed, on the last day, in the selected areas of the two Emilian cities.

The first site for the workshop is Unipol Group’s complex located in Bologna in a lot between Viale Aldo Moro, via Cesare Gnudi and via Stalingrado. The 4600sqm area is a modern urban door and is located in the immediate vicinity of the exhibition area - a monumental work of the early seventies by Kenzo Tange. The area is divided by the important road axes that cross it, and it has no historical architectural. It is placed just outside of the city center but is very crowded and animated by the considerable transit that brings people in and out of Bologna every day. The second site is Park XXII Aprile in Modena, built in 1976 in the area that was historically occupied by Villa Pentetorri and the Naviglio canal, which was used in the past as the waterway of connection with Ferrara. The complex was made up of a wide park with a big road that connected the villa with the city and numerous still-existent annexes, like the stables that are in the northern part of the park. The villa was demolished after the bombing of 1944. To date, the only remaing element is the monumental entrance gate. It will be possible to see the future installations from the street or while crossing the park.

The applications open on 27th April and close on 29th May 2020; the workshop is free, the selection will be based on merit and motivation.
More info: www.tresoldiacademy.com

YAC
YAC – Young Architects Competitions – promotes architectural competitions and training course in collaboration with prestigious professional firms and academic institutions. Funded in 2013 from the idea of three young engineers who were convinced that the competition of ideas could be the ideal tool to foster discussion and research on architecture, YAC has been working and collaborating with the most renowned firms of contemporary architecture and has tackled different and numerous topics of architectural design. After five years from its foundation, YAC decided to open its network of renowned architects to young designers, with the aim of supporting them in their professional path: for this reason, four courses are created in collaboration with Ferrari, Technogym and the Italian Government Real Estate Agency. The courses are held at YACademy’s prestigious headquarters located in a historical building in the center of Bologna, close to the Two Towers and next to Piazza Santo Stefano.
www.youngarchitectscompetitions.com

Edoardo Tresoldi
Edoardo Tresoldi plays with the transparency of mesh and with industrial materials to transcend the time-space dimension and narrate a dialogue between Art and World, a visual summary which reveals itself in the fade-out of physical limitations. His works have been featured in public spaces, archaeological contexts, contemporary art and music festivals and group shows. In 2016 he carried out the restoration of the Basilica paleocristiana of Siponto, a unique convergence between contemporary art and archaeology. The Basilica has been awarded the Gold Medal for Italian Architecture 2018 – Special Prize to Commission, the most prestigious Italian architecture award. In 2017 he has been included by Forbes among the 30 most influential European artists under 30. In April 2018 he realizes Etherea for Coachella Musics and Arts Festival, one of the world’s most anticipated and important music events.
www.edoardotresoldi.com

STUDIO STUDIO STUDIO
STUDIO STUDIO STUDIO is the interdisciplinary project founded by Edoardo Tresoldi. It is on a mission to explore the blending between social, cultural and aesthetic suggestions as a starting point to define an ultra contemporary dimension.

G124
G124 is the code that identifies the room in Palazzo Giustiniani - the Italian Senate building - assigned to architect and senator Renzo Piano. As soon as he became a senator, he decided he would make sense of his role by dealing with a major project for our country: the suburbs, which represent the city of the future that we will leave to the children. The G124 is a group made up of young architects (all under-35 and paid with the Senator's salary) who are coordinated by tutors and helped by other professional figures (sociologists, anthropologists, economists, critics, town planners...) and have the task of producing studies on a suburb in one year of work. There are no nominations for the selection of the neighborhood that will be studied by the G124: it is the group itself that explores opportunities and possibilities and decides where to concentrate their efforts for the year.
www.renzopianog124.com

Urban Up | Unipol
Urban Up is the real estate project of Unipol Group aimed at enhancing some of the most important architectures in Italy which are owned by the Group through works of modernization and renovation that combine an innovative drive with the respect for tradition. The Urban Up project, which started from the city of Milan with the redevelopment of some key-buildings of the city, history-wise and position-wise, continues in various Italian cities with interventions that both promote their own trophy assets but also regenerate urban suburbs, by declining the value of sustainability in the real estate field through the adoption of design solutions inspired by environmental safeguard.
www.urbanupunipol.com

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