OPERAZIONE CA’ BRÜTTA
Thirty Photographers, Two Archives

It all started with the restoration of one of Milan’s best-loved buildings, the Ca’ Brütta. A building photographed in the fifties by Ugo Mulas and portrayed on many different occasions by Gabriele Basilico. Stimulated by the new image that the building will be offering the city from 2016 onward, we had the idea of organizing a wide-ranging photographic project that would bear witness to its undiminished fascination. And we called it ‘Operation Ca’ Brütta’: an invitation made to a group of thirty photographers from Milan or at least resident in Milan, each of whom has agreed to take on the challenge of representing one of the city’s ‘noble’ buildings. Almost all of them were familiar with it, very few knew its history and all were or have become fascinated by it.

The thirty photographers have different backgrounds, different interests and belong to different generations, and it is with this spirit that they were called on: to carry out a sort of exercise in individual perspective that would be translated in the sum of the images into a lesson of applied vision. Thus Marina Ballo Charmet, Giorgio Barrera, Settimio Benedusi, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Riccardo Bucci, Maurizio Camagna, Luca Campigotto, Marisa Chiodo, Sabina Colombo (after an idea of Cesare Colombo’s), Luca Contino, Alessandra Ferrazza, Giovanni Gastel, Giovanni Hänninen, Marco Introini, Cosmo Laera, Delfino Sisto Legnani, Davide Monteleone, Gianni Nigro, Cristina Omenetto, Simona Pesarini, Matteo Piazza, Pietro Privitera, Francesco Radino, Ray Banhoff, Claudio Sabatino, Efrem Raimondi, Laura Rizzi / Cristina Fiorentini, Alessandro Scotti, Toni Thorimbert and Paolo Ventura have freely interpreted Ca’ Brütta, depicting it on the inside and the outside, in its details, as a whole and in its colours, creating, as was hoped, a sample of the many possible interpretations that contemporary photography has to offer.

GIOVANNA CALVENZI