Exhibition "ARRHOV FRICK. URSPRUNG Origine/Origin" - with photographs by Mikael Olsson

ARRHOV FRICK
URSPRUNG
Origine/Origin

With Mikael Olsson

Exhibition promoted by the Academy of Architecture of the Università della Svizzera italiana
Curated by Arrhov Frick

15 November 2024 – 2 March 2025

OPENING

Thursday 14 November 2024, at 6.30 pm, with a public lecture by Amy Perkins and James Binning (Assemble Studio, London) moderated by Stéphanie Bru (Bruther, Paris) and Johan Arrhov (Arrhov Frick, Stockholm).

Speakers include Academy Dean Walter Angonese, Faculty Coordinator and Head of exhibitions Marco Della Torre, and Johan Arrhov, Visiting Professor USI-ARC and curator of the exhibition.

Friday 15 November 2024, at 12.30 pm, the opening continues with a food performance by Asako Iwama, cook and artist, with the support of the students of the Academy of Architecture.

The Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio (TAM) of the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), is pleased to present ‘ARRHOV FRICK. URSPRUNG Origine / Origin’ promoted by the Academy of Architecture, curated by the Swedish architectural firm Arrhov Frick and with photography by Mikael Olsson.

With a clearly innovative format, the Academy of Architecture is presenting an exhibition in the making that will officially open to the public on the evening of 14 November 2024, and at noon the following day, but will continue to evolve and be enriched in time. An experiment in active cultural mediation, the exhibition brings the target public of the Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio closer to new ways of thinking / imagining possible projects for modifying our living space, both collective and private, on principles dictated by new needs and new constraints bound up with the living and the environment.
In the course of autumn 2024, the Teatro dell'architettura will become the venue for four simultaneous processes: a Design Studio, the Public Lecture series of the Fall semester 2024, also curated by Arrhov Frick, 1:1 installations and fragments from Arrhov Frick practice. These parallell processes are together making the exhibition whose title Ursprung will provide the shared frame of reference, according to Arrhov Frick:
Ursprung can be the source of a river, an architecture, a thought, oxygen, a fire, the sun or the moment before. Both in Swedish and German, the word tells about origin, whether it would be memories, an existing situation, a climatic condition or a circular system.

THE EXHIBITION
The exhibition path on the ground floor and first gallery of the Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio is marked by thematic sections, all of which refer to the design research and method of the Swedish architecture firm Arrhov Frick. They are accompanied by numerous drawings by the architects and large photographs by Swedish artist and photographer Mikael Olsson, who has developed a personal approach in his way of interpreting architecture, namely a radical re-vision and re-presentation through the photographic medium.

From September to December 2024, the Teatro dell’architettura of Mendrisio will be constantly inhabited and experienced by the students of the Academy of Architecture attending the Arrhov Frick autumn USI Design Studio, and who, week by week, will set up an archive of research and projects and a series of 1:1 scale prototypes dealing with TAM as part of the exhibition. The students and staff of the Design Studio will also collaborate in seminars and workshops with lecturers and experts in various fields. All this will lead to the creation of a sort a veritable agora, also intervening in the environmental and spatial conditions of the Teatro dell’architettura with the site-specific installations. The purpose is to reactivate the possible relationships between the inside and outside of the building by exploring principles related to construction, reduction of energy consumtion and basic fundamentals of architecture as space, light.

ARRHOV FRICK
Johan Arrhov (1979) and Henrik Frick (1977) received their MSc in architecture from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2007 under the supervision of Professor Ana Betancour, who introduced them to an innovative and research-based approach to design. Together they founded Arrhov Frick in 2010 in Stockholm, Sweden. Carlos Nieto Cid (1977) became a partner in 2017. In parallell to the studio an involvement in the academic discourse as critics in juries and universities is important. They give public lectures at universities globally and their work has been widely published in monographs and journals internationally, such as as 2G (n77) and El Croquis (n217). The Arrhov Frick studio has received various awards over the years and exhibited at "Forests of Sweden" at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016.
Johan Arrhov has been teaching design at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio since 2021, where he holds a Design Studio oriented towards research into topics related to simple constructions, changes in social needs and behaviours, both understood as a tool for developing appropriate and meaningful architectural projects.

MIKAEL OLSSON
Mikael Olsson (1969) is an artist and photographer, trained at the Department of Photography and Film at the University of Gothenburg 1993–96. A main theme in his works is the reenactment of history and the presence of the past in current times. Olsson’s debut book, Södrakull Frösakull (Steidl, 2011, with texts by Beatriz Colomina and Helena Mattsson), is an investigation of two Bruno Mathsson buildings, creating a condensation of modernist biologically oriented preoccupations, for which the houses are an extreme Swedish concentrate. In on | auf (Steidl, 2020), Olsson maps a pavilion by the architects Herzog & de Meuron and the artist Ai Weiwei – a project which, according to the author Péter Nádas, is characterized by “the tension between visual faculties and visual conventions, the reality of perception and the reality of vision, of the concrete and the abstract.” The relationship between perception and representation is further examined in his ‘semi-autobiographical work’ Olsson Mikael (Art and Theory, 2022). Olsson has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, both in Sweden and abroad. He has collaborated with Japanese fashion designer Jun Takahashi, and acted in films by Swedish Palme d’Or winner Ruben Östlund (The Square) and Italian film director Luca Guadagnino (Suspiria). Olsson is working with an ongoing project on Sigurd Lewerentz, which so far has been disseminated in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2018, where Olsson exhibited together with the architect Petra Gipp, and the book LWRNTZ [work in progress] (Andersson Örn, 2022).  Mikael Olsson is represented by Galerie Nordenhake.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE URSPRUNG PROJECT
Public talks
19-09-2024, A Place Made of the Existing by Jean-Philippe Vassal, architect, Lacaton & Vassal, Paris
17-10-2024, Passive / Active by Paul Bouet, architecture historian, ENSA Paris with Olivier Dambron, civil engineer, Atmos lab, London
14-11-2024, Open-ended by Amy Perkins and James Binning, architects, Assemble Studio, London 
05-12-2024, Circular Strategies by Tina Ekener, architect, baubüro in situ, Basel 

URSPRUNG project contributors
Mikael Olsson, artist and photographer, Stockholm
Iris Lacoudre, architect, USI-ARC assistant, Paris-Mendrisio
Akane Moriyama, textile artist and architect, Stockholm 
Asako Iwama, artist and cook, Berlin
Andrea Roscetti, building physics engineer, USI-ARC MER, Mendrisio 
Sayako Hirakimoto, architect, Lugano 
Mario Monotti, civil engineer, USI-ARC Professor, Locarno-Mendrisio
David Mutti, gardener, Mendrisio
Ana Betancour, architect, AHO Professor, Oslo 
Muck Petzet, architect, USI-ARC Professor, Berlin-Mendrisio
Giovanni Piovene, architect, Milan
Elena Catalano, architect, USI-ARC assistant, Palermo-Mendrisio
Edoardo Biondetti, architect, USI-ARC assistant, Milano-Mendrisio
Students of Atelier Arrhov Studio at the Academy of Architecture

GUIDED TOURS
During the exhibition, the Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio has scheduled lectures, encounters, open days and guided tours. Specific information on these events will be communicated in due course and available on the website www.tam.usi.ch.

• During the special open-day weekends, free guided tours of the exhibition, at 11.00 am, accompanied by students of the Academy of Architecture:
  Sat 16 – Sun 17 November 2024 
  Sat 7 – Sun 8 December 2024
  Sat 1 – Sun 2 February 2025
  Sat 1 – Sun 2 March 2025
   
• Guided tours with the exhibition team or guided tours for groups (ITA, ENG, GER, FR) – by reservation. To request information and book guided tours, write to eventi.tam@usi.ch

Calendar and Opening Hours
15 November 2024 – 2 March 2024

• Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday: 2–6 pm
• Saturday / Sunday: 10 am-6 pm
  Only during the following special opening weekends
  Sat 16 - Sun 17 November 2024
  Sat 7 - Sun 8 December 2024
  Sat 1 - Sun 2 February 2025
  Sat 1 - Sun 2 March 2025
• Mondays closed
• Winter closure: from 21 December 2024 to 6 January 2025

ADMISSION FREE