JOHANNA DIEHL - Borgo

About

With the exhibition BORGO Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf Frankfurt presents works from a recent series by Johanna Diehl made 2011 in Italy. In her photographs the artist deals with the structure of ideal settlements built under Benito Mussolini in the backcountry of Sicily between 1926 and 1943 which articulate an attempt of creating social order. As already in her previous series 'Displace' Johanna Diehl focuses on the memory of places, the media awareness of architecture and its connection to ideology. Those programmatically designed villages, so-called Borghi", were intended to colonize and develop the rural Sicily and served as centres for the agrarian communities. The borghi generally consist of buildings with similar types: a central piazza, a church, governmental headquarters, school and other facilities representing the structure and the claim for power of the Fascist Party. Nowadays most of the borghi may be found abandoned within a landscape as unfulfilled Utopias, as places without memory filled with time.