Frittelli Rizzo Gallery presents Torre Branca and Other Common Places, the gallery’s second exhibition dedicated to three major projects by Francesco Jodice (Naples, 1967), each created for significant institutional commissions: Margini (2017), Falansterio (2020) and Torre Branca (2023). The exhibition offers a unified reading of works that, although originating in different contexts, are brought together here for their capacity to reflect on the totemic power of architecture and its ability to evoke profound cultural transformations within communities.

Alongside Jodice’s works, the exhibition also presents documents related to the study and preparation of the Torre Branca project, on loan from the Fondazione Dalmine archives in Bergamo, together with the scale model of the Torre Branca, today preserved in a private collection in Milan.

Margini (2017) is a film created by Francesco Jodice for Da io a noi. La città senza confini, the first contemporary art exhibition ever held at the Quirinale. The film opens with the words of writer Carlo Cassola — “I love the outskirts more than the city. I love all things that stand at the margins” — from which its title derives. The work is composed of excerpts from around sixty films set in the outskirts of Italian metropolitan areas from the 1950s to the present. Built through the use of a split screen that juxtaposes and connects places in transformation with characters from italian cinema, the film creates an endless, imaginary dialogue between geographies and eras. The result is a kaleidoscope of voices and social landscapes that re-stage the genesis and evolution of Italy’s suburban areas, recounting their aspirations, virtues, failures, and precariousness.

Falansterio (2020), project created for Italia in-attesa at Palazzo Barberini, comprises six “photographic postcards” produced using satellite imagery and accompanied by short narrative texts. The series offers a distanced yet rigorous survey of key examples of some emblematic Italian public architecture. From the Colosseum to the megastructures of the twentieth century — including Rome’s Corviale, Milan’s Gallaratese, the Vele of Scampia, Palermo’s ZEN and Trieste’s Quadrilatero — Jodice brings ancient and modern archeologies into dialogue, viewing these complexes as material witnesses of an urban season shaped by powerful expectations of social renewal. The artist highlights how, once certain ambitions faded, these great structures persisted as monolithic reminders of an unrealized idea of society.

The Torre Branca (2023) project, developed for the exhibition Architetture Inabitabili at the Centrale Montemartini in Rome, offers a historical and cultural reinterpretation of the tower designed by Giò Ponti in Milan’s Parco Sempione. Jodice retraces the events that have shaped the Tower’s collective imaginary — from its presence in Fascist propaganda to advertising, and its appearances in Italian cinema — demonstrating how the tower, although partly stripped of its original urban centrality, continues to serve as an identity landmark for the city of Milan. Alongside this archival investigation, the artist presents speculative variations generated through artificial intelligence, reimagining the tower as a modular and reconfigurable structure, projected into a possible future. The project is completed by a nocturnal photographic work made in Parco Sempione, which restores to the tower a monumental aura and a renewed symbolic centrality within the urban landscape.

By bringing together Margini, Falansterio, and Torre Branca, the exhibition outlines a coherent overview of Francesco Jodice’s research on Italian urban space and its symbolic devices. The works — filmic, photographic, and documentary — are presented as analytical tools for examining collective forms of inhabiting, and as opportunities to reflect on the policies, narratives, and cultural legacies that those forms continue to generate.

A special thanks to Giampaolo Abbondio,Fondazione Dalmine, Alessandro Enginoli, Enrico Fornello, Simone e Tullio Leggeri, Magda e Rocco Mangia.