Diagrams presents a historical survey of 300 analog graphs and infographics, books, rare documents, and publications, dating back to the 12th century and up to the present day. It allows us to trace the evidence of the transversal and diachronic nature of diagrams, enriched by the publication edited by Irma Boom.
The exhibition path is structured according to a rigorous logic, diagrammatic in itself, across the two floors of Ca’ Corner, with a compass (a meta-diagram) on the ground floor that guides us in understanding the project and the research methodologies that preceded it. On the upper floor, a series of identical showcases, composed of niches and staggered reading levels, organize all the materials into themes, articulated in subthemes, starting from “contemporary urgencies”: Built Environment, Health, Inequality, Migration, Natural Environment, Resources, War, Truth, and Value.
The architecture of data and information: the Diagrams project
Prada’s proposal for this year, which we recalled staging art as a critique of the economic and capitalist system starting from the concept of “debt” in Monte di Pietà 2024, continues with the intention of using the artistic display to question reality through form, content, and data. In Monte di Pietà, the exhibited works reflected on material and immaterial values, evoking memories, traumas, and ideological tensions. The exhibition used the language of art to stage a system of values: money, power, guilt, redemption.
In contrast, Diagrams adopts an apparently opposite language: that of abstraction, of analysis, of the coding of visual thought. The exhibition focuses on the diagram as a conceptual tool, not only of representation but also of production of meaning. Here the attention shifts from symbolic content to the architecture of information, to the structure of ideas, to the way in which data, relationships, and flows are visualized and therefore understood. The single datum is used as raw material from which to derive meanings, visions, narratives.
“The diagram is the possibility of the fact, not the fact itself”: starting from this assumption by Gilles Deleuze, the exhibition invites reflection on the diagram form as a means to create meaning, to shape or influence thought or, in opposition, to create propaganda and persuasion and convey mistaken, harmful, or politically aligned ideas masked as scientific data. OMA, through the study and the display, juxtaposes a wide and deep selection of diagrams from 1200 A.D. in a minimal, deliberately decontextualized way, which hammers both their value and their risk. Quoting Koolhaas, “this means that diagrams not only exist by default in any new medium, but can also be applied practically to any area of human life,” omnipresent across the geographies and times of humanity.
Leave a Reply