Nanda Vigo’s «Starting from ZERO»: An Alternative Habitat for the Italian Domestic Landscape

Abstract

Amid the profound cultural and social transformations that reshaped Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of domestic living was radically reconsidered. This article examines an unpublished project developed by Nanda Vigo: Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, an exhibition curated by Emilio Ambasz at MoMA in 1972 (New York). Both in its title and in its spatial configuration, Vigo’s proposal embodies the possibility of «starting from ZERO» with Italian domesticity. Drawing on previously unseen archival sources, the article situates Vigo’s work within contemporary artistic experimentations and the aerospace imaginaries that, at the time, were redefining ways of living. Her project takes shape as a «neutral», «dimensionless», and «anti-gravitational» «box»: an interior without partitions, conceived as an «empty» desert-like space, ideally extending into the infinite expanse of the universe. Finally, the article highlights the project’s objectives in dialogue with contemporaneous proposals in Ambasz’s exhibition, such as those by Ettore Sottsass Jr., Archizoom and Superstudio: the definition of a habitat liberated from the strictures of functionalism and open to the full freedom of living beings.