Pietro Fortuna: Glory

Using the laden concept of the piazza, Italian artist Pietro Fortuna has recreated an open public area within Tramway’s main gallery as part of his month-long residency. Large-scale cardboard constructions, the shape of blown up architectural models for inner city building plans, have been placed around the space. Like faceless architecture, these cardboard façades make it look like a vast, timeless blueprint for a non-space, emphasising the surrounding emptiness.

Fortuna explains his concept as examining the idea that community, beyond ethnicity and ideology, can locate itself in the simple sharing of a place, giving the impression that open space can be apolitical. But surely all space is created in a political context, within a web of social nodes. The nondescript cardboard installation jars with his series of religious motifs, which reinforce an ideological ground. There is no such thing as a simple sharing of space – even heaven has no clean slate.

The artist invited various groups, all with existing links to Tramway, to interact with his piazza. During the opening event, and as a public culmination of a two-week exploration, poets, gardeners, students from the portfolio class, church-goers from the nearby church, and ten artists from the Ironbbratz group, gathered in the piazza for a performance. Later in the month Ironbbratz, a collective based in Glasgow’s Merchant city, will do a show in response to this event, inviting all the participants, with the intention to expand on Fortuna’s idea with their own interpretation of the piazza in its modern-day guise.

Tramway, Glasgow, until Sun 12 Sep