Multiplicity

Multiple Viewpoints Emerging from 1990s Urban Research

Multiplicity is a Milan-based research network formed to read urban change across architecture, planning, geography, photography, and social research. Fondazione Antonio Ratti describes its method as directing multiple voices and viewpoints toward a single subject and investigating the same place from different angles^*1.

In an oral history for the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Stefano Boeri recalls the 1990s urban research that led toward Multiplicity. Photography was used to break apart the “single viewpoint” through which planning maps and aerial photographs organize territory from above, replacing it with multiple ways of seeing that included people moving through a place and the imaginations of its residents^*21.

The method responded to a European urban condition after the 1990s in which change could no longer be understood simply through completed buildings. In a text republished by documenta, Stefano Boeri and Multiplicity describe leaving behind the conventional architectural magazine and the city center as privileged viewpoints, gathering case studies of migration, informal economies, cross-border lives, and the reuse of industrial land at urban margins^*3.

Photography thus became an observational tool for connecting changes on the ground to other evidence, not a medium for producing a representative image of the city. In a recent interview, Boeri compares the method to a “local biopsy”: examining a small site closely in order to read the condition of a larger whole and making the less visible processes shaping space legible through phenomena changing in real time^*4.

The need for “multiple viewpoints” was built into Multiplicity’s approach to urban research from the outset. Multiplicity—Mappe at Viafarini in 1995 raised the problem that conventional architectural and planning methods were failing to register changes in both the form of cities and the ways they were inhabited^*26 From the beginning, photography was treated as a kind of map for reading flows, routes, continuities between places, and memory, rather than as a record of architectural exteriors alone.

USE: Refusing a Single Overview of the City

USE: Uncertain States of Europe involved seventy researchers from fifteen countries, each describing urban transformations across Europe through different forms. A Boeri/Multiplicity text republished in documenta’s Platform 6 records the use of photographs, video, diagrams, and other media according to the needs of each case, with multiple forms presented together in the final exhibition^*3.

Kunstinstituut Melly likewise describes USE as a “survey-installation” in which a large research network brought the research itself into exhibition space, documenting presentations in Bordeaux, Brussels, Tokyo, Perth, and Milan^*7.

The multiplication of media was not an end in itself. Urban change appeared through labor, movement, legal systems, informal use, and differences in time as well as through buildings, so each subject required a different combination of photographs, maps, testimony, and video.

Solid Sea: Reading the Sea as Routes and Selection, Not Empty Space

Solid Sea investigated the Mediterranean as a political space through which people, goods, information, and capital move under different rules. The project turns from familiar images of open water and cultural exchange toward the institutions that regulate passage. Generali Foundation explains that Multiplicity treated the Mediterranean as a “solid mass,” examining it from several directions through maps, photographs, and video^*5.

An e-flux announcement likewise describes Solid Sea as an ongoing investigation of the flows of people, goods, information, and capital across the Mediterranean and the unequal conditions of mobility experienced by those who live there^*6.

A photograph of a point at sea does not directly show who may pass through it, which routes are classified as legal or illegal, or how many hours the same distance takes for different people. By connecting photographs to maps, interviews, video, and documents, the project makes the institutions behind the landscape readable.

The Ghost Ship: Reconstructing an Event through a Chain of Evidence

Solid Sea 01: The Ghost Ship investigated a maritime disaster off Sicily at Christmas 1996 in which many migrants died. IFFR presents the work as a reconstruction of the event and describes Multiplicity as a collective investigating “recent, hidden transformations” of cities and territories^*8.

A 2002 Nettime post by Boeri on Solid Sea records both the 1996 sinking and the long period during which the event itself was denied^*24 Photographs and testimony were gathered to reach the fact that the disaster occurred through multiple routes of evidence, not to stage a dramatic reenactment of an unseen tragedy.

Xing presents The Ghost Ship as the first in a sequence of case studies on transformations of the Mediterranean and records the limited recovery and identification of bodies after the disaster^*17.

Domus describes The Ghost Ship as a two-room video installation built from underwater footage by Giovanni Maria Bellu and testimony from people involved, addressing the long denial of the 1996 Mediterranean sinking^*18 Here, photographs and video become part of political evidence through comparison with testimony and spatial information rather than through any claim to prove the event on their own.

The Road Map: The Same Start and Destination Do Not Mean the Same Distance

The Road Map recorded two taxi journeys near Jerusalem between nearby starting points and destinations, one taken by a person with Israeli identification and the other by a Palestinian traveler. Pratt Institute notes that one trip took about an hour while the other took more than five, demonstrating how checkpoints and territorial divisions alter movement^*10.

The 2003 exhibition Territories at KW Institute presented Multiplicity through research comparing “border devices”—checkpoints, roads, identity documents, legal categories, and other mechanisms that filter human movement^*22 The Road Map was therefore more than a one-time demonstration of unequal travel time. It measured how architecture and legal systems split everyday routes.

Boeri himself later described the experiment as an example of border devices altering bodily travel time, using the two routes to measure the territorial structure of the West Bank^*4.

The work layers maps, time, travel records, and photographs to show how institutions turn the same geographic space into different realities. Photographs give specificity to the map, while the map reveals differences in route that the photographs cannot contain; each medium makes the limits of the other visible.

Photography, Video, Maps, Exhibition: Documentary without a Fixed Medium

TBA21 lists Solid Sea as a documenta 11 commission and records it as a collaborative work by Stefano Boeri, Maddalena Bregani, Francisca Insulza, Francesco Jodice, Giovanni La Varra, John Palmesino, and others^*9.

CAMERA Torino’s retrospective materials confirm that photographer Francesco Jodice was one of Multiplicity’s founding members and describe his individual work as moving across photography, video, and installation^*14.

Stefano Boeri Architetti lists Solid Sea, The Road Map, and USE among Multiplicity’s principal projects, linking them respectively to migration, borders in the West Bank, and the self-organization of European cities^*11.

A Landscape Biennial profile likewise traces Boeri’s study of urban and territorial change in the 1990s and his use of Multiplicity to analyze social phenomena beyond the boundaries of architecture^*15 The medium changes because each subject requires a different mode of presentation.

After documenta 11: From the Photographic Work to the Structure of Research

Multiplicity’s presence in the official archive of documenta 11—the eleventh edition of the international contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel—shows that Solid Sea entered the 2002 exhibition as part of broader debates on migration and globalization^*2.

Current documenta retrospective materials describe documenta 11 as a project built from five “Platforms,” including discussions across four continents, that addressed intersections between culture and complex global systems of knowledge^*25 This structure closely matched Multiplicity’s emphasis on research, discussion, and knowledge production over the presentation of a self-contained finished object.

A Studio International review of documenta 11 argues that the exhibition foregrounded works addressing politics, history, and global inequality instead of promoting a single artistic style, a setting in which Solid Sea was also read^*12.

A Generali Foundation publication describes several international collectives of the period as examining migration, labor, and information systems in search of new geographies that conventional geographic divisions could no longer adequately describe^*16.

Later criticism around Manifesta 12 also cites Solid Sea as an earlier point of reference for thinking about contemporary art in relation to Palermo and the Mediterranean^*13 From the perspective of photographic history, Multiplicity shifts documentary emphasis away from the search for a decisive single image and toward who gathers the material, how it is cross-checked, and in what sequence it is made public.

Allan Sekula addressed related questions during the same period through a different method. The Getty Research Institute situates Sekula after Conceptual art as an artist who moved documentary beyond isolated decisive moments into long-term sequences and writing in order to critique globalization^*27 Fish Story likewise follows port labor and the global economy through photographs, text, and slides, reading the sea as a space of logistics and work^*28 There is no confirmed direct line of influence, but their shared participation in documenta 11 shows that around 2000, multiple practices were using several forms of material to describe systems that could not be seen in a single photograph.

Evidence Is Not Neutral: Editing and Diagramming as Objects of Critique

A 2003 article in il manifesto describes The Ghost Ship as a work that traced a Mediterranean disaster and institutional silence through multiple screens and documents^*19.

A contemporary Frieze review discusses the Ghost Ship component of Solid Sea as a story where the deaths of migrants from Sri Lanka intersected with prolonged administrative silence, noting how multiple screens of underwater footage and testimony functioned as an assembly of voices^*23.

AlbumArte’s profile of Francesco Jodice likewise confirms that he cofounded Multiplicity and continued to work across photography, video, and social research^*20.

More material does not automatically produce greater objectivity. The scale of a map, the selection of testimony, the editing of video, and the order of an exhibition all involve interpretation. Multiplicity does not conceal those choices; it places photographs in structures where they can be compared with other forms of evidence.

Photography is not fixed as an art object, a press record, or an urban-planning document. It enters the same investigative process as collecting materials, interviewing people, and conducting fieldwork. In that sense, Multiplicity provides an important point of contact between research-based art and expanded documentary practices since the 1990s.