Alterazioni Video and Virgil Abloh exhbition: Incompiuto: the birth of a style

Campoli Presti is pleased to announce Incompiuto: the birth of a style, an exhibition by the collective Alterazioni Video in collaboration with Virgil Abloh, and the launch of the homonymous book published by Humboldt Books in 2018.

Alterazioni Video, founded in 2004, functions as a platform to investigate the social and political aspects of art through alternative uses of new media. Since 2006, the collective has been engaged in an ongoing study which surveys and maps the aesthetics and formal features of unfinished public architecture spread throughout Italy, in particular in Sicily. They have catalogued more than 600 unfinished public architecture projects such as bridges, motorways, hospitals, stadia, prisons and theatres, scattered over the Italian territory. During Manifesta 12, in 2018, Alterazioni Video presented Incompiuto: La nascita di uno Stile in Palermo. Through extensive documentation, the work develops the prospective through which Italian contemporary landscape can be reread. The project has been the subject of PhD dissertations and the topic of many conferences worldwide.

For the project at Campoli Presti, Alterazioni Video has collaborated with fashion designer and artist Virgil Abloh. The collaboration began when Mr. Abloh took Incompiuto: the birth of a style as an inspiration for the Off-White™ 2019 Menswear collection, and invited the collective to create the advertising campaign and the set design for their upcoming Off-White™ Autumn Winter 2019 Men’s fashion show, which will take place in Paris at the Louvre Museum on 16th January. In response, Alterazioni Video has invited Mr. Abloh to work together on a project for Campoli Presti.

The dialogue between Mr. Abloh and Alterazioni Video has given room to an unstable and fragmentary imaginary in which different sensibilities and aesthetics influence each other. The project traverses various disciplines that are activated in the context of an art gallery, formulating Incompiuto as a style on its own.

The exhibition features a video installation (An invitation for a Dream , 2018) which exposes the theoretical base of the project in a legendary dialogue between anthropologist Marc Augé and critic and curator Robert Storr, both authors in the book. The presentation also includes a series of mirror chrome prints of the Off-White™ 2019 men’s pre-fall collection photographed by Viktor Vauthier and two landscapes from Alterazioni Video’s Incompiuto archive.