If you suddenly find yourself inside a solid or an extremely geometric mineral with numerous small doors where entry and exit are not specified, you will think you have been sucked into Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Just as in Octavia, the city of ropes and cobwebs, suspended between two mountains over the void, all the other cities are open places of the mind for wandering in and out of oneself. Imagination is that fundamental tool that is based on experience but sublimates it; Einstein, who first imagined curved space-time, often said that knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the world.
How does one learn to fall? Is it possible to learn to fall? Is the feeling of falling a state of mind? Is it possible to return to the starting point after losing balance?
Paul Klee, in his pedagogical sketchbook, tells how it’s possible to clearly distinguish phases of addition and phases of subtraction within the production process of any work. The organisational process of experience also passes through two important phases of addition and subtraction.
On a summer morning in 1902, the bell tower of San Marco collapsed on itself after a few slight movements to the right and left. Dust and rubble spilled everywhere like a volcanic eruption, leaving the Venetians who were watching the scene stunned. What happens when such an important landmark collapses? Is it possible to rebuild it from the same rubble? What if a structure is designed to fall? Imagining in a post-collapse scenario, the elements were catalogued and then recomposed into towers of precarious balance, using the pre- existing images as generators of new images and imagery.
In Come costruire un castello di carte the possibility of falling is envisaged as a contemporary experience and need. The project focuses on personal attempts to investigate precariousness, balance and the tensions that characterise its parts. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the permanent and the finite take on a new, unstable value.