Ralf Hütter's Site-Specific Installation at Rome's Indipendenza Studio

Ralf Hütter, co-founder of Kraftwerk, presents 'Kraftwerk – The Man Machine', a site-specific audio-visual installation at Indipendenza Studio in Rome, curated by Michael Bracewell. The exhibition runs through the gallery's Liberty-style apartment spaces, contrasting its Belle Époque interior with the band's proto-digital aesthetic. Hütter, the last surviving member of Kraftwerk, explains that the group never distinguished between visual and sonic elements, treating sound as having its own form. The show features graphics and videos by Hütter and the late Florian Schneider (died 2020), making visible the sonic dimension of movement. Kraftwerk's multidisciplinary approach emerged in late 1960s Düsseldorf, where they founded the Kling Klang studio in 1970 and produced seminal albums like 'Autobahn' (1974), 'The Robots' (1978), and 'Computerworld' (1981). The band was initially embraced by the art world before the music industry. Hütter is represented by Berlin gallery Monika Sprüth and has exhibited at MoMA New York and the Venice Biennale. The installation activates a temporal short-circuit between the utopian Belle Époque and a superseded future, resonating with the gallery's deliberately unfinished spaces.