edited by Davide Tommaso Ferrando Bart Lootsma Kanokwan Trakulyingcharoen
ITAL IAN COL LAGE
CONTENTS
6
FOREWORD Bart Lootsma CRITICAL ESSAYS
10 24 44 62
ARCHITECTURAL DRAWINGS IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA Bart Lootsma
80
DRAWING AND COLLAGE Sam Jacob
IMAGE AS REFERENCE. THE NEW LIFE OF CUTOUT FIGURES Marta Magagnini ALL THAT IS SOCIAL MELTS INTO THE NETWORK Davide Tommaso Ferrando NOBLESSE OBLIGE. THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S USES OF COLLAGES Giacomo Pala
DRAWN THEORIES
96 110 128 146
MONTAGES FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN ARCHITECTURE [BETTER: OF ARCHITECTURE] THAT IS ITALIAN [BETTER: UNIVERSAL] Beniamino Servino CORSAIR DRAWINGS Carmelo Baglivo ABOUT THE IDEA OF MONTAGE AS A FORM OF PRODUCTION Luca Galofaro A FACEBOOK CHAT WITH BENIAMINO, CARMELO AND LUCA Davide Tommaso Ferrando THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE IMAGE
176 190
CONFORMI.TUMBLR.COM Davide Trabucco THE POWER OF AN EPHEMERAL ART ROBOCOOP
ITALIAN COLLAGE
T
his book is the result of an inquiry into a specific category of contemporary architectural drawing: digital collages produced by Italian architects who extensively use social media, notably Facebook and Instagram, for their dissemination. Of course, they also publish their work in more traditional media, such as magazines and books, and present it in exhibitions and installations, but the new opportunities the Internet offers to publish ideas and works by oneself, without the necessity of editorial boards, publishers or shops, and thus to diffuse them instantly and at a high frequency among (much) wider audiences than before and get immediate feedback from them, seem to be related to the form and content of their work. It was also clear to us that the protagonists knew each other, followed each other, talked to each other, both verbally and often through their collages. As the relationship between architecture and media is one of the focuses of research at the Department of Architectural Theory of the University of Innsbruck, this did not escape our attention and led to lively debates. The first outcome of these discussions was the symposium Italian Collage, Architectural Drawings in the Age of Social Media we organized at the Kunstraum Innsbruck on the 12th of December 2014, with contributions by Bart Lootsma, Davide Tommaso Ferrando, Stefano De Martino, Luca Galofaro, Carmelo Baglivo, Beniamino Servino, Marta Magagnini, Alexa Baumgartner and Kanokwan Trakulyingcharoen. At the time, the phenomenon addressed by the symposium was still new but enough material, works and texts, had already been produced to question what was going on here. Today, six years later, architecture-related media outlets, from printed magazines to social networks, are engulfed with so-called “post-digital” drawings, which have by now established themselves as one of the main forms of architectural communication, particularly used by younger, “hipster” practices. Still, a lot can be learned from this special moment in Italian architecture.
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Foreword
This book is organized in three main parts. The first part gathers a series of essays written between 2014 and 2019 by Bart Lootsma, Davide Tommaso Ferrando and Giacomo Pala, all members of the Department of Architectural Theory of the University of Innsbruck, by Marta Magagnini, a specialist in the field of the representation of recent Italian architecture from the University of Camerino, and by Sam Jacob, Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago and founder of Sam Jacob Studio, London, who in 2017 published an article that generated a lively debate around post-digital architecture, which we are glad to republish with a new set of illustrations by the author and his students. The second part of the book is dedicated to an in-depth exploration of the work of three of the most representative authors of Italian Collage: Beniamino Servino, Carmelo Baglivo and Luca Galofaro. It contains portfolios of their work and original texts written by them on the occasion of the symposium in Innsbruck. This section is enriched and closed by the transcription of a conversation between them and Davide Tommaso Ferrando in October 2019, which updates and critically evaluates the scope of their drawing practice. The third and last part of the book gathers the visual researches of two younger authors, Davide Trabucco and the artistic duo ROBOCOOP, whose approach to architectural collage pursues the road taken by Baglivo, Servino and Galofaro, in a different, but no less interesting way.
Bart Lootsma
These drawings, even if they were originally conceived outside the network environment, assume and replicate its dynamics as soon as they become part of it, mutating into yet another kind of visual content.
Facebook instance of Carmelo Baglivo, Villa Malaparte con Struttura, 2015
Davide Tommaso Ferrando
ALL THAT IS SOCIAL MELTS INTO THE NETWORK
My images are reflections made public, meant to describe a city with neither a center nor a periphery, without antagonism, layered and heterogeneous, without objectifying languages, democratic and with no demiurge.
Carmelo Baglivo
CORSAIR DRAWINGS
Carmelo Baglivo, Roma Sparita, 2012
ITALIAN COLLAGE
THE VOIDS The first step is to design empty spaces. In 1978, Argan wrote the following statement in the catalogue of the exhibition Roma Interrotta, “It was easier to design the cities of the future than those of the past. Rome is an interrupted city because it stopped being imagined and began to be (poorly) planned. In Rome, the issue is more time than space… while space is opaque, time is transparent.” Due to its history, Rome seems inconsumable, at the center of the world and at the same time outside of it. While its ancient buildings belong to mass culture, they are not eroded by the image consumption affecting contemporary architecture, always too communicated even before being built. The 1748 Nolli Plan of Rome and the plan of Berlin in 1990. Two cities with huge voids within their urban fabric. Two cities that had the chance to work with their voids but ended up just filling the voids. PIRANESI Rome and its representations are the starting point of my research. In his views, Piranesi represented different places of Rome starting from objective facts, but reinventing their background, expanding spaces and architectural objects. He developed different and impossible points of views. Adjusting the rules of perspective, showing us what we could not see in reality. Piranesian space is empty. Interiors look like exteriors and vice versa. For this reason, we can talk about a representation of the city as a “sequence of interior spaces” or rooms, as a succession of urban living rooms, as autonomous images. In his “Imaginary Prisons”, space is entirely condensed into a single image, as an infrastructure always showing in its entirety, but here the infrastructure is inhabited, a ruin adjusted to a new function, an immense debris attacked by accretions. It’s the beauty of the ruin that is no longer architecture because it lost its function, turning into something everybody understands and admires. The beauty of the object’s bareness, of memory and remembrance. Structures can be
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Corsair Drawings
Carmelo Baglivo, Sul Monumento Continuo, 2014
Carmelo Baglivo
In my work, montage is very important because it is the operative tool for the interpretation of the personal archive by constructing the annotations that form an interpretative atlas of the real.
Luca Galofaro
ABOUT THE IDEA OF MONTAGE AS A FORM OF PRODUCTION
Luca Galofaro, My table of work_postcards, 2018
ITALIAN COLLAGE
time inserting it into a play of relations that may produce an actual cognitive shock. The archive (the image as pure object, a datum related to its iconic meaning) and montage (the place this same datum occupies within a dialectical system) are the two essential poles of looking in the contemporary world. A discursive practice focused on the presence of gap, of interruption, on continuous découpage and rémontage, on an accumulation of “symptoms” rather than “data”, of unexpected patterns, utterly transversal relations, each time reconfigured within a procedure without ever having a closure, montage seems to be the only critical-visual device to obtain a non-standard kind of truth.9 Working on discontinuity, on the structural breakdown of that image-concept short circuit, any visual practice always runs the risk of carrying with it (behind every image the danger always lurks of the automatic comment, the stereotype, the immediate and prepackaged term), montage becomes a true form of plunder and renewed raiment of the gaze. If the image as such, as one reads in Devant le temps10 (2000) is not the imitation of things, but the interval made visible, the fracture line between things, then the gaze too is interval, line of fracture. If the image does not spring from an orderly continuum of causes and effects, and is rather a dialectical vision composed of past and present in eternal collision, a sudden shock within which one can grasp the lacerating discontinuity of time, then the gaze too, the critical gaze, seems to rely on shock, on “collision”, the dialectical friction among the elements of its vision, as the defining factors of its very structure. There is no single reading, as there is no single sequence of images possible. Every eye can be critical in the face of history literally opening up to a non-standard dimension of vision (and discourse).11
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Luca Galofaro, Life on Mars, 2012 (Collection Frac center val de Loire)
About the Idea of Montage as a Form of Production
Luca Galofaro
THE ARCHITECTURE
OF THE IMAGE
1
Davide Trabucco
12
13
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Davide Trabucco
Several Italian architects have recently taken up the technique of collage again to present their ideas. The three masters of this tendency are Carmelo Baglivo, Luca Galofaro and Beniamino Servino, while the younger generation includes authors such as Davide Trabucco and ROBOCOOP. If collage has been one of the favorite techniques in Italian architecture since the nineteen sixties, the current collagists are new in ways that relate to developments in digital technology. They use software like Photoshop to create their images, recur to social media like Facebook to post their work and they can refer to the whole history of architectural and non-architectural imagery, which is instantly accessible on the Web. Their collages can be visual comments as well as daring fantasies. The book presents a rich selection of images and original texts dedicated to this phenomenon.
texts by Carmelo Baglivo Davide T. Ferrando Luca Galofaro Sam Jacob Bart Lootsma Marta Magagnini Giacomo Pala ROBOCOOP Beniamino Servino Davide Trabucco