A real skate park at the Triennale di Milano

It will be inaugurated today at the Triennale Milano the installation OooOoO by South Korean artist Koo Jeong A, as part of the PLAY! exhibition – on display from November 27th, 2019 through February, 16th, 2020, a project designed and curated by Julia Peyton-Jones with Lorenza Baroncelli.

It's a real multisensorial skate park, useable by a maximum of 15 people at the same time, and that will be open free until the end of the exhibition, before being donated to the city of Milan. Besides being the first indoor skate park designed by the South Korean artist, who since the '90s has been exploring the concept of space through site-specific experiential and participative installations, OooOoO will be accompanied by the music of Koreless, an electronic producer from Glasgow and often a Club To Club act. The installation, designed specifically for the Triennale Milano, aims at stimulating in the visitor physical and mental participation of the space, that challenges the usual dynamic between human and object, between individual and community.

Koo Jeong A's interest in participative spaces has often gone together with the development of skate parks. It dates back to 2012 one of her best-known works, OTRO, a nocturnal skate park built on the island of Vassivière, in France: thanks to a structure covered in glow-in-the-dark green, every time a skater moves the ground colours in a different shade, allowing the skaters to see each other and therefore not bump into each other. Similar projects were the 2015 EVERTO, this time built in Liverpool, and the following year with ARROGATION, designed on the occasion of the 32nd Sao Paolo Biennal, in Brazil.

On the occasion of PLAY!, Triennale Milano presents moreover the Triennale Milano Academy of Skateboarding featuring bastard, a real skate academy with sessions guided by expert coaches for kids and teenagers, from 7 to 18 years old, to be taken place at the OooOoO skatepark.

Waiting to see what a skate park looks like in a museum, OooOoO installation proves the unprecedented attention and focus for the subculture that over the last few years has contributed to defining the aesthetic and the role of the city of Milan.