Matilde Cassani

For the third edition of the One Year-Long Research Project ar/ge kunst has invited artist and architect Matilde Cassani to take up residency in Bolzano.

The residency co-commissioned with Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, has led Cassani to develop new research in the macro-region straddling the Italo-Austrian border; a territory that the artist has explored by observing the sport of cricket, an English game exported to all Commonwealth nations during colonialism and returned to Europe through its practice by migrant communities.

Matilde Cassani (1980) studied Architecture at the Polytechnical College in Milan and at the TU Lisbon, followed by Architecture and Urban Culture at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona and the UPC (Universidade Politecnica de Catalunya) in Barcelona (postgraduate degree). In her work Matilde Cassani operates at the borders of architecture, installation and event design. Her research-based practice reflects on the spatial implications of cultural pluralism in the contemporary western context. Her works have been shown in numerous cultural institutions and exhibition venues; they have also been published in media including Architectural Review, Domus, Abitare, Arqa, Arkitecktur, and MONU magazine on urbanism. Matilde Cassani has been a resident fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and at the Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In 2011, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York showed her exhibition Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings. In addition, she designed the national pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain at Venice Architecture Biennial (2012) and participated in Venice Architecture Biennial in 2014 with the work Countryside Worship. This work was recently acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Cassani currently teaches at the Politecnico di Milano and the Domus Academy.