Lecture date: 2016-02-25
Chiara Carpenter, Catharine Rossi, Giovanna Silva and Sumitra Upham
To mark publication of Nightswimming: Discotheques from the 1960s to the Present, this evening brings together two projects that examine the radical architectural ideas that ushered in a new wave of nightlife and discotheques in 1960s Italy. Nightswimming (Bedford Press) authors Giovanna Silva and Chiara Carpenter will discuss their survey of nightclubs in Italy and Europe through photography, interviews and key texts, while Catharine Rossi and Sumitra Upham, curators of the ICA exhibition ‘Radical Disco: Architecture and Nightlife in Italy, 1965–1975’, will present archival documents, photographs, architectural drawings, film, music and articles that detail this little-known movement.
Chiara Carpenter lives in Milan. In 2014 she exhibited Nightswimming with Giovanna Silva at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition. Since 2011 she has worked with San Rocco, organising exhibitions for the Book of Copies and the Collaborations projects at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition. She has worked with Humboldt Books since 2012.
Catharine Rossi is a design historian and the author of Crafting Design in Italy: From Post-War to Postmodernism (2015) and The Italian Avant-Garde: 1968–75, co-edited with Alex Coles. She has worked on exhibitions at the V&A and MoMA and in 2014 curated Space Electronic: Then and Now at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. She has written for a number of publications, academic journals and magazines including Crafts, Disegno and Domus.
Giovanna Silva is a photographer and publisher based in Milan. She is co-founder of San Rocco, and the founder and managing editor of Humboldt Books. She is the author of a number of titles, including Desertions (2007), Orantes (2011), Narratives/Relazioni: Baghdad, Green Zone, Red Zone, Babylon (2012), and in the same series Narratives/Relazioni: Libya, House by House, Inch by Inch, Alley by Alley (2013) and Cyprus, Foxtrot-Gate (2014). In 2014, with Chiara Carpenter, she exhibited Nightswimming at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition.
Sumitra Upham is Design Curator at Oxo Tower Wharf. Previously she worked at the White Cube, London, and as an associate curator at the ICA. Her recent exhibitions include Radical Disco: Architecture and Nightlife in Italy 1965–1975; Shout Out! UK Pirate Radio in the 1980s; Whose Gaze is it Anyway?; and Cybernetic Serendipity: a Documentation.
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