Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki in

If All Time Is Eternally Present

 

If All Time Is Eternally Present stages a nocturnal encounter between video works, architecture and public space on the façade of Palazzo Nervi Scattolin (1963 – 1972), transformed into an urban exhibition device.

The exhibition inaugurates Building Dialogue, a new cycle of curatorial initiatives with which the Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation extends its research to the comparison with artistic practices, taking Nervi's architecture as speculative tools to question contemporaneity. In dialogue with the works, the façade amplifies the potential of projection as a form of construction of public discourse, affirming the cultural power of the ephemeral and opposing the city-monument with the value of impermanence.

The title of the exhibition – a tribute to T.S. Eliot – encapsulates the temporal coexistence of Nervi's legacy and the relevance of the works. It is the notions of Zeitgeist (the spirit of the time) and Jetztzeit (the time of the hour) that define the theoretical framework of the relationship between the works and the building, both interpreters of their own time and agents who question it.
The project represented an important opportunity for Nervi to confront the debate around modernity. Commissioned to design the new headquarters of the Cassa di Risparmio on the site where the nineteenth-century building was located, he offered a paradigmatic contribution within a broader process of cultural, urban and social renewal, in which architecture would play a central role.
Palazzo Nervi Scattolin, in its praise of discontinuity, resonates in the practices of Williams, Bennani & Barki, and Shani: subjective readers of a collective condition capable of providing critical tools for reading the present, as Nervi's architecture was able to do in its own time.