Fondazione Prada presents the exhibition “Machines à penser”, until 25 November 2018 at the Venice location, inside the Ca’ Corner della Regina palace

Fondazione Prada presents the exhibition “Machines à penser” curated by Dieter Roelstraete, until 25 November 2018 at the Venice location, inside the Ca’ Corner della Regina palace

 

The project explores the connections between conditions of exile, flight and retreat and physical or mental places that foster reflection, thought and intellectual production.

“Machines à penser” focuses on three fundamental figures of 20th-century philosophy: Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).

During their lives the latter two philosophers shared the need to create their own place of intellectual refuge: Heidegger spent long periods in a chalet at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, while Wittgenstein retreated in various periods of his life to a refuge located on a fjord at Skjolden in Norway.

In the case of Adorno, the condition of exile is examined, caused by the rise of Nazism in Germany; he went first to Oxford and then to Los Angeles, where he wrote Minima moralia, a set of aphorisms that also investigate the theme of forced migration.

In keeping with these reflections, the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay made Adorno’s Hut in 1987, a central installation of the exhibition, together with the architectural reconstructions of the retreats in which Heidegger and Wittgenstein wrote their fundamental works, respectively Being and Time (1927) and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).