Park Associati presents The Grey Catalogue, a photographic exhibition of the works included in Barbara Rossi's project of the same name, supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. The project explores the tension between memory and progress, reflecting on the preservation of the historical identity of places. The scheduled talk will provide an opportunity for discussion with Barbara Rossi and Katya Knyazeva (Historian and Journalist), in dialogue with Michele Versaci (Strategy and Proposal Coordinator at Park Associati). The works will be on display at Park Hub from February 25 to March 1, 2025.
The Grey Catalogue is a photographic investigation documenting the emptied working-class neighborhoods—the Lilong—and their typical architecture, the Shikumen, sealed and suspended in time by a gray spiderweb-like barrier. An archive of streets, buildings, and views that, through a wide range of grey hues, invites reflection on the rapid urbanization of Shanghai, promoted by the government. This chromatic exploration, traversing shapes, materials, and sensations, helps us reflect on the meaning of grey as the color of contemporaneity.
From the original body of the project, seven photographs are displayed, accompanied by brief descriptions of the buildings captured, testifying to a past era, like parchment sheets speaking to a slowly fading history. Essential to this aspect was the collaboration with Katya Knyazeva and consultation of her book Shanghai Old Town. The Walled City, as well as academic articles and conversations with residents.
Barbara Rossi explains how cataloguing in the Lilong becomes not only a research exercise but an act of memory. With her photographic inventory, The Grey Catalogue presents a narrative in which past and future dissolve, and cataloguing becomes the last possible act of resistance.
What motivates the freezing of entire neighborhoods, enveloping them in a veil of smoke? The photographic research of The Grey Catalogue brings us closer to understanding a phenomenon whose methods and reasons remain somewhat unclear, offering a narrative in which cataloguing becomes the final act of preservation.
Park Associati
Park Associati is an interdisciplinary collective of architects, designers, researchers and innovators, united by the desire to shape the future of the built environment. Founded in Milan in 2000 by Filippo Pagliani and Michele Rossi, the studio operates across architectural, urban, landscape, interior, and product design, championing an interdisciplinary approach. Every project developed by Park Associati inhabits its own specific context, from the Regione Lombardia skyscraper to the headquarters of Luxottica and Salewa, from residential and retail spaces to the revitalization of modernist buildings or entire neighborhoods. Operating at the intersection between tradition and innovation, the studio excels at reinterpreting and regenerating cities to become new models of liveability and sustainability, using adaptive reuse as a core strategy. Park Associati has won numerous awards, including the Premio Architetto Italiano 2024 granted by the Consiglio Nazionale degli Architetti Pianificatori Paesaggisti e Conservatori.
Park Hub
Since 2017, in line with the desire to contribute to the public debate and be influenced by new stimuli, Park Associati has opened its studio to the city and other professional and artistic experiences. Tuning in to the vibrancy of Milan, the cultural initiative Park Hub was born: a flexible space to host a program of exhibitions, events, and talks. It’s an opportunity for interaction and exchange with art, publishing, and design, with a focus on typological and formal experimentation, as well as collaboration with other disciplines. In 2025, Park Associati celebrates 25 years of the studio's activity, a journey distinguished by its ability to combine creativity and research. The cultural program of Park Hub, curated by Costanza Nizzi, focuses this year on events addressing issues of public relevance, while maintaining a strong connection with the lively cultural scene of the city of Milan.
Barbara Rossi
Barbara Rossi works as architecture photographer between Italy and Germany. Beside the commissioned works over the years she has carried out a personal research about landscape transformations and human intervention on landscape. Her photographic work starts from the interpretation of architecture as the primary sign of the relationship between man, space and time. She’s interested in the recurrent, documentary and poetic aspect of those architectures conceived without any aesthetic purpose, such as construction sites, ruins or unfinished works, lands-in-between suspended in space and time where the relationship between human, space and time becomes particularly visible. Her work has been featured in personal and group show at the 18. Biennale di Architettura di Venezia, Cultural Institute of Egyptian Embassy in Rome, ACENTRICSPACE in Shanghai, and others. In 2024 she receives the grant Strategia Fotografia promoted by the Ministry of Culture in Italy to support Italian photography abroad.
Katya Knyazeva
Katya Knyazeva, from Novosibirsk, Russia, is a historian and a journalist with a focus on urban form, heritage preservation and the Russian diaspora in Shanghai. She is the author of the two-volume history and photographic atlas Shanghai Old Town. Topography of a Phantom City (Suzhou Creek Press, 2015 and 2018). Her articles on history and architecture appear in international media and in her blog http://avezink.livejournal.com. In 2019–2024 Katya was a Research Fellow at the Universitá del Piemonte Orientale
The exhibition The Grey Catalogue is part of Barbara Rossi’s research project The Grey Catalogue supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
The project was also realised thanks to the support of Officine Milano.
