Gianni Pettena. Anarchitecture

"I prefer to do architecture, very often temporary architecture, with the tools of art. But how can we act on the environment without exercising a "Some violence?" asks Gianni Pettena in a conversation with his long-time friend and architect James Wines published in 2010. Let's ask a question which contains all the issues of the catalogue of the exhibition "Anarchitecture" devoted to the work of Gianni Pettena (born in Bolzano in 1940) at the crossroads of art and architecture. The work takes the bias of the places surveyed by Gianni Pettena, with emphasis on influence and consideration in his practice of the specificities of two geographies. On the one hand, Italy, a country of the artist's origin - from the Dolomite mountains which he defines as his " school of architecture" on the island of Elba, on the other, the desert spaces of the American West. In a wish to break down barriers between disciplines, Gianni Pettena has never ceased to question through art the foundations of our architectures by questioning and criticizing functionalism at all prices and social and capitalist injunctions which predetermine so much of our daily behaviors than the design of our living environments. In the light of current ecological issues, it is a question of re-evaluating the relevance, the radicality and the poetry with which Gianni Pettena works today, thanks to the pioneering, attentive, already worried look that he had been carrying since the end of the 1960s on the precariousness and importance of links - living, ecological and emotional - which unite us to our environments.