Lecture: 'Love, Death, Crime and Architecture'

La Madre, il Figlio e l’Architetto (The Mother, the Son and the Architect) is a short film about a church in the form of a sphere in Gibellina, a town in Sicily that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968 and was reconstructed in the 1980s. The church is designed by Ludovico Quaroni, an Italian architect. He’s the father of Emilio – a past lover of Petra Noordkamp – who killed his mother some years after their first encounter.

“During Noordkamp’s search for Emilio, the move that takes her to the church designed by Ludovico Quaroni – although prompted in part by chance – is as practical as it is inescapable. The multiple absence, caused by love, death, crime, madness, distance and incomprehension, that permeates all these relationships, as diverse as they are interrelated, surely could not be transformed into an experience anywhere better than in Quaroni’s church in Sicily. The questions are no longer why Emilio killed his mother, why his father built this church, or how Petra Noordkamp can still be interested in him. The questions have become more general, more important, spatial and visual. Or rather: instead of answering these questions, architecture creates the framework within which they can be asked in the best possible way.”

— Christophe van Gerrewey, Foamcahier, June 2012

Bio - Petra Noordkamp (Losser, 1967) studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her film La Madre, il Figlio e l’Architetto got its premiere at Foam in 2012 and after that it was shown in various places around the world, including Tehran, Rome, Porto and Budapest. In 2014 she was commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York to make a short film to capture the Grande Cretto, a landart work by the Italian artist Alberto Burri. This film was in the last year part of exhibitions at K21 in Düsseldorf, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the MAXXI in Rome. Her work has been published in many magazines and newspapers such as San Rocco Magazine, Club Donny, The Purple Journal, Volkskrant Magazine, NRC Handelsblad and Avenue. At the moment she is working on a new short film about the experimental éco-quartier Eva-Lanxmeer in Culemborg, the Netherlands.

Students react to Petra Noordkamp' lecture on Love, Death, Crime and Architecture