Tadashi Kawamata's nests arrive in Milan.

From March 31 to July 23, 2022, BUILDING in Milan presents the exhibition Nests in Milan dedicated to Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata (Hokkaido, 1953), curated by Antonella Soldaini. The artist has specially conceived a series of wooden installations for four interventions that will take place both in the interior spaces and facade of BUILDING and in the exterior spaces of other buildings in its surroundings, such as the Grand Hotel et de Milan, the Fondazione Cariplo Convention Center and the Cortile della Magnolia, and the Palazzo di Brera.

These will be joined by another intervention carried out at ADI Design Museum that heralds a larger project: right here, in agreement with BUILDING, Kawamata will create asite-specific work in the fall designed to give new life to the wood used in the interventions of Nests in Milan.

Invited to the Japanese pavilion at the 1982 Venice Biennale, Kawamata subsequently participated in site-specific projects around the world. His works, mostly made from wood, are intended to reflect on the social context and human relationships. Underlying his work, however, are urbanistic challenges. Construction sites under construction or those under demolition, the undeveloped areas that remain in the urban space are the focus of Kawamata’s interest, who, in the realization of his projects, uses materials present on the site by recycling them.

Born out of a reflection on the relationship his works generate with the social context and human relationships, Kawamata’s interventions aim not only to involve a single building, but to enlarge the area of intervention in such a way as to encompass a portion of the urban fabric. By appropriating interior and exterior spaces, such as facades, balconies, and roofs of buildings, through a series of constructions obtained byinterweaving wooden planks that form a grid, seemingly light but with a solid structure, the artist solicits a different reading and interpretation of their appearance and meaning. However, the interventions are united by the theme of the nest, a recurring subject of his different installations. It is a theme that Kawamata has been investigating since 1998, when his wooden constructions came visually closer to depicting at first a shack and then a nest. This subject refers to the universal need to build, in both the animal and human worlds, a place to find shelter.

On the occasion of the exhibition, workshops were organized in educational collaboration with the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

Image: Tadashi Kawamata, Nest in Milan No. 1 (2022; site-specific work, BUILDING). Photo by Paolo Riolzi Studio. Courtesy of BUILDING.

Tadashi Kawamata's nests arrive in Milan.

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