Where and when
RIVA
Tuesday 19 September, H4:30pm
Expanding the Landscape of Justice
Open lesson by Walter Hood
Scientific coordination:
Annacaterina Piras | LWCircus-IT | Firenze
Chiara de’ Rossi | LWCircus-IT | Roma
Organizazion: LWCircus.org
Presented by the non-profit organization LWCircus.org, Walter Hood’s open lesson is a preview of the shared operational workshop entitled “LWCircus-ArnoLab017” which will take place from 21 to 30 September.
The lesson will review a series of case studies conducted in the United States of America which show how landscapes are able to express and reflect a series of different values and attitudes towards issues of race, class and civil rights. From each of the studies, it emerges in a completely unique and particular way how landscape, sculpture and architecture can contribute to widening the field of landscape experience.
Walter Hood
is the creative director and founder of the Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. His works often explore themes such as those of race, identity, social justice and environmental design. Wood is also a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally. The Hood Design Studio’s activity is divided into three distinct sectors dedicated respectively to art and production aspects, to design and to the landscape,
to research and urban planning. The urban spaces that arise from it and the objects that furnish them rise to the role of public sculptures, creating new views through which to admire the beauty, diversity and idiosyncrasies that emerge from the surrounding landscape. The firm’s award-winning works have appeared in numerous magazines and publications including Dwell, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Architectural Digest, Places Journal and Landscape Architecture Magazine. Walter Hood was also awarded the 2017 Architecture Award assigned by the Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Metropolitan Nashville Arts Commission has chosen Walter Hood to entrust him with the creation of new works of public art intended to commemorate, at the Public Square Park, in the city center, the role played by the city within the historic Movement for Civil Rights. Hood’s project, Witness Walls, consists of a series of fragmented sculptural walls inspired by the sculptural friezes of the classical age with which mythical and heroic events were commemorated in antiquity. Walking between the walls, visitors are brought to the center of historical moments immortalized by photographs from the collection of the Civil Rights Reading Room of the Nashville Public Library. The installation was created on the west side of the historic Metro Courthouse in Nashville, a few steps from the place where the student protest took place on April 19, 1960, which led the then mayor Ben West to deny and repudiate racial segregation in public places of Nashville.
Adapted from: http://www.hooddesignstudio.com/witnesswall
FOTOGRAFIA | WITNESS WALLS – photo by HOOD DESIGN STUDIO