KOOZ What prompted the project?

GIOVANNI HÄNNINEN Milan, like other cities in the world subject to lockdown, had emptied itself. I desired to portrait this epochal moment, but I didn’t want to show a city as we would see it on the 15th of August or in the early hours of the day when it hasn't woken up yet. Milano was not sleeping, but in pause. Architecture remained, but its use was frozen. To use an idea by Richard Sennett, the cité and the ville had divorced. In an era of communication, advertising billboards are an integral part of the architecture of our cities. I was very impressed walking in the empty city seeing that in few days these billboards were emptied, no longer carrying the messages and images from which we are daily bombarded. They became like missing pieces in the landscape of our cities, of our architecture, of our lives.

I decided that these billboards were a metaphor for this pause and in general for the period we were and are still experiencing.

KOOZ What questions does the project raise?

GH In a moment like this, photography can only rise questions and possibly push us to reflect on the reality we are living in. In particular the great topic that is rising stronger and stronger is: what will be the role of architecture in the future? What changes await us? Will cities be able to adapt to new uses related to physical - and not social - distancing between its inhabitants?

These are questions that photography can help to elaborate. The photographer can create a section of the reality while observing the city through a methodological frame. Just like a mathematician would do to describe, or better to model, a phenomenon. He would focus on the most important variables that define the problem and he would simplify the complex reality in order to better understand it.

I tried to build a model of the city, using a suspended point of view to underline this moment of pause, of detachment between a known past and an uncertain future. Hoping in this way to raise some questions about the future of the city.

KOOZ What role does photography play in documenting epochal shifts in the way we inhabit and perceive the city?

GH I think that photography can have the role of creating a memory for the future but is only a tool and thus depends on how it is used. On newspapers and magazines, we have been bombarded by images of the lockdown, of the emptiness, of masks, hospitals, queues and so on. This bulimia of images has always happened in important moments of our history. Few of these images have remained in time and now represent the memory, the history of these events. I think that a professional photographer who wants to use this medium to create a document of the shift we have been living has to detach himself from the frenzy of capturing the instant and producing snapshots. As this period taught us, it is time to rethink our life-rhythms. Slowing down and create thoughtful images is the only way to focus on the subtle changes that are occurring.

KOOZ What is for you the importance of images as those of Walker Evans and Bill Owens, James Nachtwey amongst others?

GH Owens, Evans and Nachtwey gave us their testimonies of three epochal events, but different for their time variable. Evans was called by the FSA to describe the long years of the Great Depression. Nachtwey photographed Ground Zero just after the tragic and violent event that we all know. Bill Owens, with his work Suburbia, looked at the new life of people living in the new suburbs of the big cities in the ’70s because of the perception that big metropolis was not safe. He focused his attention on this aspect well before the broader understanding that this was an epochal change.

KOOZ What drew you to focus on the billboards as a means to represent and invite us to reflect upon our contemporary situation?

GH As I said I decided to use these billboards as a metaphor for this moment that we have being living. A white square that is something we missed, but at the same time it is a blank space that we can fill with something new. New ideas, new proposals, new social and economic models.

The search for billboards throughout the city became also the pretext for a storytelling of the life during this epochal emergency. The city is not completely empty and the uses, even if minimal, change over time. From the elderly who wear a mask on their heads, to those who shop. From the riders who "feed us" to the electrician who runs with the battery to reactivate the frozen cars. It becomes a process: find the empty billboard, find the wanted frame and then wait. Time, and the pause of it during the lockdown, becomes the main ingredient in this research.

KOOZ Stripped of their advertisements, white becomes the symbol of blankness and the void. How and to what extent does the colour assume the role of content rather than context?

GH The blank billboards can be seen as the unknown, what lingers on our heads - an unknown idol that can represent the fear for the unknown: the black monolith in A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.

Or on the other hand represent a “space available” for new ideas, a metaphor for the hope that this time will give birth to a new way of living and experiencing cities and architecture.

KOOZ During your talk for Milano Archweek you talk about these images as a ‘memory’ for the future and of the ‘future spectator’, could you expand on these notions further?

GH The reason why I decided to document this moment is first of all to create a memory for the future. A way to remind us of this pause even when the life of our cities will return to being hectic. I started this project thinking to satisfy the need to document this moment. Then I realised it was also a desire. Desire - in the etymological sense De-, "without", and sidus, "star”- as lack of something that we no longer have. The need to describe the lack of life as we have known it so far. Something we've all experienced: the desire to go back to doing things the way we did them before. From the awareness of this desire I hope that the memory of these days will help us to focus on the changes that will arrive in the future.

KOOZ As a photographer what would you say is your most important tool?

GH The most important tool of a photographer is time. The main task of a photographer is to observe. Looking at the thing in perspective. And this perspective is not only spatial, but also temporal. Time is essential to understand the world we live in.

Bio

Giovanni Hänninen is a photographer who lives and works in Milan, where he earned a PhD in Aerospace Engineering. He teaches Photography for Architecture at the School of Architecture and Society of the Politecnico di Milano. His works are part of many collections, both private and institutional, among which are The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the Musée d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden (MACAAL) of Marrakech and the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea (MUFOCO) in Italy.