Margherita Moscardini. Super Super
Margherita Moscardini and Gabriella Rebello Kolandra in Conversation
 
GK
Could you tell us about Super Super?
 
MM
It was conceived at the end of 2023, stemming from an invitation to reflect on a specific area in the city of Lodi, where the Adda River intersects the ring road via a bridge – a pedestrian and cycle pathway that is inhabited by many people. I spent time at this place and with its people every month for a year, thanks to the help of Stefano Joli and Manuela Bolognini. Many conversations and visits were undertaken through the lens of the city understood as a community of people (civitas) who, according to their needs, organise the material environment (urbs) and govern themselves (polis). To speak about this place, it became necessary for me to transform Platea.
 
GK
Platea is a space dedicated to contemporary art, created from a display window on the façade of Palazzo Galeano, a historic building on Lodi’s main street. In 2021, with the birth of Platea, a room no longer used by the building’s porter was detached from the newly built exhibition space and rendered inaccessible.
 
MM
Yes, and through Super Super , with the complicity of that room, the two-dimensional space of the display window gains a third dimension. It becomes permanently accessible, presenting itself as a connection between the public realm of the street and the private realm of the palace’s inner courtyard.
Platea diventa letteralmente una platea, una sequenza di gradini domestici a disposizione del pubblico notte e giorno, senza filtri, per l’intera durata della mostra. Anziché terminare sulla soglia, la strada penetra l’edificio che, attraverso un interruttore orario astronomico, adesso si illumina in accordo con l’illuminazione pubblica. Platea si trasforma in un supporto,  si comporta come una piazza dove il passante può stare per osservare la strada ed essere osservato dalla città.
 
GK
The spectacle of the street, of urban space.
The idea of referencing Lina Bo Bardi came immediately when I grasped Platea’s former characteristics – a volume inaccessible to the public and only experienced through glass. Specifically, we established a dialogue with one of her projects closest to my heart: Teatro Oficina in São Paulo, Brazil, home to the eponymous theatre company founded in 1958. Bo Bardi, starting from the street, unifies spaces along a demarcated axis and opens the building to the city, thereby enabling a dissolution between stage and audience – a typical feature of experimental endeavours that challenge traditional theatre and reflect Artaud’s concept of total theatre. A raw theatre, without a stage, a communal entity.
I find such approach intriguing for two reasons: on one hand, the structure of the theatre company represents an approach to Grotowski’s ideas and to “poor theatre” in the pursuit of a theatrical practice that stands between art and life; on the other, the building becomes a vast scenic box where actors, spectators, and technicians are in close contact. In this way, the boundaries between roles and bodies inhabiting the theatrical space dissolve.
At Teatro Oficina, theatre becomes a collective project whose radical nature emerges from the shared celebration with the audience, and, in this sense, Super Super profoundly interprets its principles.
Now, what kind of public might the space and time of this exhibition generate?
 
MM
If it is true that, almost by subtraction, the advancing street and the receding property are two forces contributing to the creation of a space that transcends the false categories of public and private – categories that undermine our way of inhabiting a place – and if it is true that only what exists can be staged, then this exhibition is, more than an experiment, a testimony: the seed of another way of inhabiting, untethered from the ordered structure by which we orient ourselves and are protected as citizens.
 
GK
I very much like to think of this exhibition as a testimony. A testimony to the existence of alternative forms of living, staged through the creation of a space that is made accessible and, above all, offers an inversion of perspectives.
 
MM
Exactly. Points of view are subverted and subjects become blurred. As in the video work THE CITY– the other piece I developed for this occasion – where the subject always eludes capture. The river becomes road, then pillar, then human, staging all the elements that contribute to the making of a city: provisional, informal.
 
GK
When Lefebvre wrote The Right to the City in 1968 – the same year Grotowski published his manifesto Towards a Poor Theatre – he emphasised the social rather than the individual value of the city: the possibility of using space freely, without regulation. Through shared use, which translates into activity, encounter, improvisation, and celebration, people can meet their needs, which Lefebvre dialectically identifies as “social” and “anthropological”, “opposite” yet “complementary”: needs of intimacy and openness, encounter and solitude, security and adventure*.
Super Super , on the one hand, seeks to express the possibilities of this space and, on the other, celebrates the political, poetic, and aesthetic potential of the street. It can serve as a platform for reflecting on the removal of barriers and boundaries limiting the possibilities of art.
 
MM
It is a device that gets activated by the city. And I love that such new configuration of the space remains available to the artists involved in Platea’s 2025 programme.
Lefebvre advises us to consider the city in its value as a work, an oeuvre, rather than in its value as a commodity.
THE CITY is a city that, in the past ten years, has become home to over three hundred people. They have inhabited the natural setting and the street infrastructure, sharing time and space not necessarily to meet primary needs such as sleeping and eating. Everyone here has a job, official documents, and a common language – Italian. Here, no one has a home, whether by choice or circumstance. Thus, this space is used to cook together, rest, play draughts – activities that are incompatible with an increasingly controlled and privatised public realm.
THE CITY contains the future not because the discomfort of lifting goods from the mud is desirable, nor because awakening in the burst of greenery along the river is preferable to awakening in a temperate greenhouse. It is futuristic because, in my opinion, the public domain, along with the condition of the individual’s exile – around which a form of open citizenship can be re-imagined – represents the only possible form of political survival for human beings.

GK
THE CITY and Super Super communicate without even looking at each other. 

MM
They are two works born from the same experience, attempting to stage one another.
At Platea, we introduced a staircase that continually opens up the space. As an object, the staircase materialises the possibility of passage. Some clay objects also temporarily inhabit Platea: a handrail, a pantry, a bedside step. These are sculptures inspired by those who place the utmost value on found objects, unaware of the circular economy, because they themselves are the landscape that transforms, incorporates, and releases without owning.
Super Super consists of a pair of shoes arranged on a bedside step lying at the foot of a bed, carefully recomposed above the flowing Adda.