Marco Casagrande & Sami Rintala :
art that comments on society
Casagrande & Rintala,
Land(e)scape, 1999
Three wooden houses/barns
Savonlinna, Finlande
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Marco Casagrande (born in 1971) and Sami Rintala (born in 1969) are a team of architects from Helsinki, Finland, that boast prolific activity in the domain of the arts.
Marco Casagrande and Sami Rintala devise architectural and landscape installations, theatre and dance settings as well as multimedia productions that comment on society and the environment.
For their landscape installation 1000 White Flags (summer 2002), for example, the artists speckled a downhill-skiing range in Koli Nature Park, Finland, with flags made of used sheets from mental hospitals. Casagrande & Rintala here drew attention to the madness of businessmen who cut down ancient forests.
The artists team participated at the Venice Biennale 2000 and the Yokohama Triennial 2001 and Demeter 2002, the Tokachi International Contemporary Art Exhibition.
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Project for the Biennale
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Casagrande & Rintala , Chain Reactor, 2002
A steel structure, chains, granite benches, gravel
6,8 x 6 x 6 m
Casagrande & Rintala , Chain Reactor, 2002
A steel structure, chains, granite benches, gravel
6,8 x 6 x 6 m
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Real Reality,
by Casagrande & Rintala
"One shall not be blindfolded by stress, the surroundings of economics, the online access to entertainment and information. What is real, is valuable. Urban planning must find a way to be connected into real things, not destructive things or design as entertainment. What is not real is not valuable.
The economical surroundings don't support kindness. Without kindness there will be no positive results. Hacking rhythm of life with no space to see the horizon, no values supporting to look for the horizon. Consuming without questioning and destroying nature which cannot be seen around and so making all this easier. Nature being a looser in economical speculations.
Globalization is concrete in the means of pollution. Economical expectations, speculations are fictive. Information is in (the) air, the means of information are secondary products. Streams of material are close to reality. Pollution is reality. The responsibility of environmental design is lost to fictive economical speculations in no connection with real reality. Surroundings shaped by no real values will destroy us. Design has replaced reality. A bear has hair because it's hairy and not because somebody has decided so.
City cannot be treated as a camp for fixed amount of legionnaires. Instead of design we need psychoanalysis. The hectic rhythm of life and dominance of economics reflects in the cityscape badly causing bad environments, ecological problems and the illusion of stress. The illusion of stress is the atmosphere in which pollution and prostitution are created. This atmosphere is closed and paranoid as in malaria.
The atmosphere of temporarity is giving the cause not to think of future. Horizon is in no social value. All human existence should be in connection to eternity, nature.
Urban design has become economical designing of dead cities with temporary masses. Thinking cities as microchips, replacing components with more effective ones. Human layers are not valued, the connection between modern man and nature does not fit into the context of urban planning."
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Work Shown at the 3rd Biennale de Montréal
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Exhibitions (selection)
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2002La 3e Biennale de Montréal - 2002, Montréal, (Québec), Canada
Demeter, Tokachi International Contemporary Art Exhibition, Japan
Land(e)scape, Urban Flashes 2, IT Park, Tapei, Taiwan
2001 Subconscious Architecture, La Biennale Dell'Arte Contemporanea di Firenze, Florence, Italy
New trends of Architecture in Europe and Japan 2001, Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, Holland
Novas Tendências da Arquitectura na Europa e Japão 2001, Espaço 2001, Porto, Portugual
New Trends of Architecture in Europe and Japan 2001, Hillside Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2000 Free Architecture, Instituto Superior Politecnico José Antonio Echevarria, La Havane, Cuba
Free Architecture, Centro Wilfredo Lam, La Septima Bienal de la Habana, Cuba
Land(e)scape, Time of Wood, Fiskars, Finland
Land(e)scape, La Biennale di Venezia 7, Mostra Internazionale di Architectura, Venise, Italy
Land(e)scape, Emerging Architecture, Riba Architecture Gallery, Londres, United Kingdom
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Casagrande & Rintala on the Web
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