S.I.A.L (Secret Investigation Agency on the Loft-Community)

LabRouge, 27th March 2013, Milan.

Secret Investigation Agency on the Loft-Community is an intensive investigation laboratory which, during one week, used LabRouge as its headquarter to disperse in a series of excursions into the Milan territory.
The project starts with a reflection about the location of the exhibition. with which we were invited to interact. The requalification of post-industrial areas into inhabited contexts (lofts) is a common practice. Milan is subjected to speculative and private investments as above. These contexts are interesting because they are like micro-villages, with the possibility of more freedom in order to modify the configuration and the aspect of its habitat.
The lofts rebel, maybe without knowing, against the architectural Italian rules which block the growth of the experimental evolution of the discipline, even to be considered out of law and mostly considered as inhabitable.
These neighborhoods are located in a peripheral circle around the city, and they could be an occasion of redevelopment and rethinking of the local areas. They could be transformed into a new work background where it is possible to re-found the relationship between citizen and the configuration of his environment. This potential is lost because they are transformed into a nonsensical elitist context closed to the city through big walls, with a perverted security system. The project creates a parody of a “secret investigation office” inside LabRouge, which studies this new alien gated-community society. A new community of a space freedom which lives in its closed world, creating a micro-universe built with hard borders isolated from the outside city.
It’s impossible to record this context around the city for their high level of security. Therefore we decided to take a hide-micro camera, we simulated to be an interested customer and, through a real estate agency, we tried to discover the secret of these compounds…
After this first stage of the project, a second part was performed inside the location of the Labrouge. The diffusion of a spatial virus which, from the investigation office invades and contaminates the whole complex, is the final aim of the research. The project is focused on the possibility that the spectators of these elitist contexts can be opened to urban life and can be melt into the reality around them.

Curated by Rossella Farinotti and Thomas Berra
Ph. Luca Condorelli