Università Iuav di Venezia

Click on ‘contents’ to access the abstracts and the contribution in open access

ISSN 2704-7598

ISBN 978-88-229-0416-4

DOI 10.1400/283005

cover picture: Armin Linke, M.O.S.E. – Consorzio Venezia Nuova, ship maneuvering simulator, Venezia, 2007

Venice is well-known, its identity is so familiar to be considered obvious, summarized as if it were a replicable logo: the city shows its face leaving behind its backbone. Here gold and mud blend together, moulding a multifaceted document. In Venice an endless interchange between real and imaginary, original and fake, tiny and huge, powerful and fragile endures, while we look at the city as a shimmering object.

The alter ego of what is well-known and obvious becomes superlative, since it exceeds predetermined standards; furthermore, it represents the inconceivable condensed in the prefix of another language as it is revealed only when one leaves the city and looks at it from above. Suddenly actions, projects, works and methods arise from its established image moving the city towards another dimension, transfiguring it. This (super) slow wind blows through Venice but does not change it: Venice continues to offer its well-known face to the mirror that every day reflects it. Challenging that wind to go deeply inside the object, means diving into the detours and contradictions of Supervenice, at least for the time of a story on paper. Venice is constantly designed and painstakingly ‘preserved’, fortuitously born in a hostile land that denies any rules of contemporary sustainability; since its foundation Venice has been built on desires and fears. The city faces the remains of the largest industrial area in Europe. A bibliographic hypertrophy lays against the material trace of 20th century modernity: a gigantic ideal library has been created by measuring the most erratic and moody city of the Western World. Even if Marco Polo found Venice boring – so boring he did not want to return from his long journey –, its stability depends on the Sirocco and the moon, like in an Oriental environment. This primordial indeterminacy makes Venice a valuable laboratory – that would not be possible elsewhere – to reflect upon critical issues for up-coming future. The context changes and, with it, certainty wavers. This is the time to reopen the paths of research and project: Supervenice digs into an all too well-known territory in order to extract its anachronical genealogies. The super alter ego of Venice is a giant bubble that suspends Time while Space wavers: what remains is the space of project.

Vesper No. 2 Author-Matter

Spring-Summer 2020

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ISSN 2704-7598

ISBN 978-88-229-0478-2

DOI 10.1400/283006

cover picture: Olivo Barbieri,

site specific_LAS VEGAS 07, 2007

The etymology of the word author refers to an act of creation, an act of augmentation, from the Latin verb augere. Author instantiates creation, the expansion of the pre-existing. In 1967 Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in his famous essay to state once more that the crisis is that of the author as a single subjectivity and as a term that condenses prestige, undermined by the de-subjectivation strategies of automatism, fortuity and fragmentation of the historical avant-gardes, as well as by the machinic act and by the reproducibility of the second avant-gardes.

Fifty years after Barthes’ paradigmatic formula, this lack of authorship appears to be a successful brand. The tensions between the anomie of matter, the law that establishes authorship and the economy that makes the work possible, invoke discordant perspectives. Artists make the self-destruction of their work the real work, and appeal is made for the demolition of architectures, whether by a recognised author or not, in order to re-design, or better still, re-claim the territory. Artificial intelligence consolidates its logics and its design by progressively shedding human ingenuity. The space of criticism becomes, finally, increasingly ephemeral. However, there is an acceptation of criticism that is, rather than an individual ‘signature’, an exploration and explanation of how design makes theory.

The binomial author-matter seeks to mark these tensions and contradictions: the featured term author is maintained to underline the persistence of that prestigious subjectivity, at the very moment when the rhetoric of “matter as an author” promises other forms of authorship.

Vesper No. 3 Wildness

Fall-Winter 2020

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ISSN 2704-7598

ISBN 978-88-229-0533-8

DOI 10.1400/283007

cover picture: Guido Guidi, Sardegna_Orani 07-2011

The sylva returns both as an image, capable of distilling the character of places and the modalities of crossing them, and a reality: forests are advancing in some territories, and the concrete presence of wild and untamed areas within cities is a constantly expanding fact. The two levels of reading of the sylva – the one taking it as a figuration through which to interpret reality and the other analysing it as actual space – require a codification of the tools and modes of inhabiting such an unknown locus.

The return of the sylvan marks the return of a new sense of the ‘archaic’, of yet another mixture of architecture and earth, a conscious combination of the conflict between the reason and the uncanny, adventure and comfort, memories of the city and sylvan ways of life. The term selva denotes precise and concrete realities and multiple imaginaries but also indicates the possible trajectory of future time as well as the turning towards a very distant past: it is an arrow whose direction establishes the connotations of a possible new contrat naturel.

Vesper No. 4 Exiles and Exoduses

Spring-Summer 2021

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ISSN 2704-7598

ISBN 978-88-229-0635-9

DOI 10.1400/283821

cover picture: Stefano Graziani, Ceruleo che varia dal blu profondo fino all’azzurro, quasi sempre passando attraverso tonalità di verde, Trieste, 2013

Two movements, perhaps antithetical, affect space. Individuals exclude themselves, exit (exilium, exsul, ex-solum), come out of their own land, withdraw into another circumstance, depose power from within, shun the power that withholds. Exile can be an individual choice, but it can also be a constraint that involves, cumulatively, a large number. At the same time, peoples, animals, and plants are in exodus, moving, fleeing, migrating, changing the design and the sense of territory and geographies.

Three figures take shape from these movements: the space of the journey and the traces of the crossing, the destination or just the place of arrival, and finally the image of the house, of the city, or of the abandoned ‘homeland’. These figures unite the two movements: certainly in exile the journey can be instantaneous; it can last as long as it takes to make a decision, to refuse, to write a text, to close a door. During the exodus, by contrast, the journey can prove to be the destination itself – in flight one may have to stop from necessity, by force, or by choice.

Exiles and exoduses sediment themselves in history, sometimes finding space in the chronicle with novel accents. While the need for a gaze from the optimal distance is reiterated, the stones of other cities are silently laid, and the blending inheritance is renewed. The two movements perhaps tell us stories of new and repeating geneses.

Vesper No. 5 Moby Dick: Adventures and Discoveries

Fall-Winter 2021

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ISSN 2704-7598

ISBN 978-88-229-0714-1

DOI 10.1400/285873

cover picture: Alberto Sinigaglia, Untitled, 2010

Melville’s narrative is mentioned to suggest, recall, and emphasise ‘frontier research’, meant as a mode of investigation literally positioned at the extremes of knowledge, at the edge of what is known. The task of any research is to go beyond the already known, the already given. Beyond the mainstream, however, working at the edges means tackling controversial issues, which are difficult to settle with established methodologies: it calls for the ‘move of the knight’. In other words, it requires experimentation even in practice. More than that, frontier research is aimed at refuting dominant paradigms, thereby working with a high degree of uncertainty and failure.

Vesper No. 6 Magic

Spring-Summer 2022

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ISSN 2704-7598

ISBN 978-88-229-0817-9

DOI 10.1400/289275

cover picture: Letizia Battaglia, Ospedale Psichiatrico. Via Pindemonte, Palermo, 1983 (ristampa 2016). Courtesy MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma. Collezione Fotografie del MAXXI

The real world lives and coexists with the oneiric, the surreal, with dreams, symbols, myths, fairy tales, magic. If that which is concrete can appear clear, measurable, objective, and rational, there is something, however, that sometimes escapes us. A vast bibliography and an immensity of works have for centuries been chasing that fleeting something, that trail, that intangible element that can alter reality. Rites of crossing space; mysteries that yield inalienable temporal depths to scenes; architectures tattooed with symbols or based on figures and forms capable of building connections; cities whose meaning and significance are not limited to the realm of objectivity: magic is the impalpable connection between reality and something other, it is the search for a possibility in the existing.

Vesper No. 7 Sky

Fall-Winter 2022

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ISSN 2704-7598

ISBN 978-88-229-0884-1

cover picture: Daro Sulakauri, I started to observe the nature, just like I did when I was a kid, dalla serie I was dreaming when I wrote this, 2020

A place of concrete phantasmagorical designs, enacted by clouds and birds, and a space of inspiration for mystical-metaphysical dreams, the celestial dome is read in the work of architecture as a gravitational mass but also as an aspiration and a purpose. Defined as a “fifth prospect” it shares with the earth plots of pollution and regulatory perimeters. The sky is a right, often also a place of competition: colossi are erected to challenge its dimension. From the sky comes the flood, the apocalypse, in the sky we can be in orbit, referring to the sky we can design cosmogonies. Earthly architecture is not powerless against this infinity, we need only raise our heads to see artifices, measured and constructed architectures, structures that challenge the beauty of the mystery of the celestial vault, announced judgments or perspective illusions to propose depths not present.

Vesper No. 8 Vesper

Spring-Summer 2023

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