Palazzi di Parole, Nicolò Quirico

With his production of "Palazzi di Parole" (buildings of words), artist Nicolò Quirico describes a fusion between what we see of the city and what the city harbours in its buildings, revolutionising landscape photography and even the perception of the cities selected. 


"Palazzi di Parole" is the output of the contemplation by architecture photographer and artist Nicolò Quirico on modern  cities, which tend to be increasingly the same, impersonal, suppressing their essential component - the inhabitants, with their lives and their voices. 
Photographs of historical buildings alternate with those of apparently unimportant buildings. The difference is not the architectural uniqueness, its role in history, or its appearance. Quirico selects these completely different architecture subjects and puts them at the same level:  they are all spanned by the dynamics of human life, they all hold its echo inside them. 
The photographer, with a hypothetical "eco-camera", makes visible the words that rebound from the walls through time. The end result is a photograph of architecture and thoughts combined, produced with a special stratagem. Quirico prints the photos of the buildings on paper that is a collage of pages from books written in the years the selected work was built, also giving them a material dynamic.  This additional manipulation makes Nicolò Quirico's work a kind of cross between architecture photography and visual art, while never losing sight of the main purpose. 
Genoa, Milan, London are all portrayed through this special lens, to bring to light an innovative viewpoint both of architecture reportage, and of the reality of big contemporary cities. Nicolò Quirico makes an appeal to architects and urban planners operating in cities to consider them through more "human" eyes, and design places that engage with the people living there.
The Spazio Seicentro in Milan held an exhibition on Nicolò Quirico in 2013, called "Complicità sovrapposte - Palazzi di Parole" (overlapping complicities - buildings of words). As part of the exhibition, personalities from the world of photography andart, philosophy and politics, came together as part of a multidisciplinary debate, with architecture as the backdrop. This confirms the complexity of the photographic artworks generated by Nicolò Quirico, shining the spotlight on the role of art in comprehending and transforming the cities of our times. 
Barbara Esposito

Barbara Esposito