Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents the solo exhibition of Ludovica Carbotta (Turin, 1982).The exhibition centers on her ongoing project Monowe, underway since 2016, in which the artist has conceived and constructed an ideal city: an urban model created for a single individual. Through a plurality of expressive means, sculpture, installation, documents, sound works and performative actions, Carbotta gives shape to an evolving organism. Here, fiction and reality coexist in a dialectic relationship. Informed by various sources of inspiration, utopian and science-fiction literature, architectural theories, and sociological analysis, this project results in a sophisticated reflection on the contemporary civilian and her condition of isolation–as an effect of external forces, a strategy of self-protection, part of the legacy of a catastrophic past, or an opportunity for future survival.

Up until now, the city of Monowe has always been presented in fragments, whether displaying architectural remnants or elements with specific functions, such as the entryway, the factory, the museum, or the watchtower. These elements bring into play the social use of these architectures as institutions, a dimension put into crisis by the solitary status of the inhabitant. Thus, the city offers the opportunity to analyze, in abstract, the rules and conventions rendered obsolete by the disappearance of the community.

For this exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Monowe will be presented for the first time as an overview, in which the individual fragments are temporarily brought together in a fabric of complementary relations and functions. Following its original presentation at MAXXI, the motif of the museum reappears in The City Museum, 2016, a living place of memory undergoing a constant process of elaboration, sedimentation, and renegotiation. Presented here is also the fragment of a new building, the Tribunale, 2019. This courtroom is a materialization of guilt and judgment, a stage upon which the concept of justice makes its appearance in a surreal trial, in which all of the roles collapse into one: the accused and the accuser, the witness and the judge. Almost as if in a backward tracking shot, these architectural structures are included in a maquette, an architectural model which reduces the scale of the elements in order to widen the viewer’s perspective. This dynamic provides a new point of entry to the project in order to better understand its logic and scope as a whole, offering a vantage point that is simultaneously retrospective and prospective, analytical and constructive, concrete and fictitious.