Curated by Luigi Fassi and Anni Venäläinen
A Week’s Notice is a three-channel video and sound installation in which miniature models of houses borrowed from the cinema, history of architecture and the artist’s private life, are seeing flying and collapsing before the viewer’s eyes. It is an ode to the disintegration of architecture that seeks beauty in instability and turns trauma into a new territory of creation and rebirth.
The work draws its theme from the process of gentrification that came on the heels of the AIDS crisis which claimed its victims in the 1980s and 1990s. In those decades, affected by the epidemic and the countless deaths it generated, the homosexual community disappeared from the neighborhoods of big cities.
The real estate business saw an economic opportunity in the massacre: lots of apartments were abruptly emptied of furniture and personal belongings and put back on the market for a new generation of healthier and wealthier tenants. In an attempt to illustrate the feeling of dread that ruled over the gay community at the time, but also regain that lost space, De Luca’s installation transforms domestic architecture into a disorienting scenario, where precariousness and the sense of loss are turned into generative elements of reconstruction.
In the artist’s words, A Week’s Notice is an antidote to monumentality and stillness, an odd, joyful response even in the face of the Apocalypse that the LGBT community has known for a very long time.
Tomaso de Luca was born in 1988 in Verona. He lives and works in Berlin. A Week’s Notice won the 2020 Maxxi Bvlgari Prize.
