Storie di virus

Ugo La Pietra, artist, designer and architect, has been investigating the meaning of living in space, both private and public, since the 1960s. Between March and May 2020 he wrote stories in time of the virus, tales that sometimes come with a sketch or a drawing. Reflections, now collected in this book, on the lost habit of staying at home, on the practice of furnishing, on the reappropriation of the city and the domestic space, advice for a new approach, accounts of days marked by the actions that happen in homes seen through the window.

“After a while, the idea of going out turns obsessive. So many prisoners at home looking for a way out: through the window, but most of all, out through the balcony – writes La Pietra. – The balcony, that place projected into urban space, outside, which in recent decades has been filled with broom cupboards, rubbish bins, air conditioners... The balcony, the living instrument that represented, in my works from the 1970s, the way of breaking the barrier between indoor and outdoor space, has today become one of the most useful domestic spaces for overcoming forced domestic claustrophobia”.

La Pietra’s original writings and drawings are presented – together with those by Corrado Levi – in the exhibition “Diari da casa. Riflessioni dalla quarantena di Ugo La Pietra e Corrado Levi” hosted at the Galleria Corraini in Mantua during Festivaletteratura 2020.