The ICA Milano Foundation presents the exhibition Wonders of the Modern World, curated by Pier Paolo Tamburelli and Anna Livia Friel, with photographs and videos by Giovanna Silva and Giulio Squillacciotti and a sound installation by Nicola Ratti. The exhibition, open to the public for free from Wednesday, March 26 to Friday, July 11, 2025, explores some "wonders of the modern world", buildings and landscapes where large crowds gather to celebrate collective rituals.

The exhibition, set up on the ground floor of the Foundation, showcases eight wonders, including the Great Mosque of Touba, the Sambódromo in Rio, and the Basilica of Notre Dame de la Paix, built as a replica of St. Peter's in Yamoussoukro in the 1980s. The eight wonders are represented by eight glass models, as well as videos and sounds that convey their ritual dimension. The exhibition stems from research conducted by the Gestaltungslehre and Design department of the Vienna University of Technology, presented to the public for the first time.

Wonders of the Modern World is a reflection on modern architecture and its limits. These wonders, which were once part of the classical architecture corpus, have been excluded from the phenomena that modern architecture has chosen to focus on. Nevertheless, in these recent modern centuries, the world has not stopped producing fantastic and improbable monuments.

Wonders of the Modern World is an attempt to observe these enormous buildings without pretending that they no longer exist.

The exhibition path begins with three large photographs by Giovanna Silva, while, in a dimly lit environment, eight architectural models in colored glass, made in 1:750 scale and illuminated from within, emerge. The models offer an abstract representation of the architectural complexes, eliminating hyper-realistic details and human figures to focus solely on their spatial grammar.

The exhibition path is enriched by videos that depict the relationship between architecture and ritual. Eight small-sized video sequences illustrate individual monumental complexes. The footage, captured by Giovanna Silva, shows the movement of the crowd in deliberately fixed and monumental architectural spaces.

A film by Giulio Squillacciotti offers a unified view of the wonders, intertwining the different scenarios into a continuous narrative. Nicola Ratti's sound installation completes the exhibition path, providing the acoustic experience of gestures and movements in space.

The "wonders" presented in the exhibition are: the Great Mosque of Touba during the Grand Magal celebration, the Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur during the Thaipusam festival, the Catholic sanctuary of Fátima, the faces of presidents sculpted on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the large fair hosting the Oktoberfest in Munich, the Sambódromo in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival, the Basilica of Notre Dame de la Paix in Yamoussoukro, and the Chronicle of Georgia monument in Tbilisi.

With Wonders of the Modern World, the ICA Milano Foundation invites the public to explore extraordinary places where history, architecture, and ritual intertwine, offering a new perspective on the forms and meanings of contemporary architecture.

The Austrian Cultural Forum in Milan is thanked for supporting the exhibition, and Finstral Gmbh and KME Group for supporting the production of the models.

ICA Milano thanks Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, the official sponsor of the Foundation, and Valsoia for supporting the programming and activities of ICA Milano.