Vesper No. 6 | Magic | Spring-Summer 2022
Luca Galofaro
Serpent Ritual. Superstudio and The Twelve Ideal Cities
The Twelve Ideal Cities seem to be the result of a ritual that has taken a
long time, fifty years, to be finally decoded and appear before readers and
onlookers as a prophecy about the forms of contemporary cities.
Superstudio produces
two contrasting images for each of the twelve cities. The first is an image,
developed through storytelling, in which space and desire, architecture and
ritual, exchange and death, vision and form in its becoming act hand in hand.
All this is figurative, made legible through language itself, with a superb
evocation that defines the organic quality of a threshold as an essential
condition of the space to be inhabited. The cities described are actually what
Benjamin defines as rites of passage, ceremonies connected to death,
birth, marriage and becoming an adult, fundamental issues in the research of
the Florentine group. In modern life these passages have become increasingly
undetectable and imperceptible and thus need to be reinvented through the space
of the city.
The second image is
pure form and visually defines the space depicted in words. This image also
captures all the layers of humanity’s involuntary memory; it is both
powerful and frail as it is the result of the synthesis of a single individual,
the designer. Magic is the outcome of the collision of these images that become
symbols.
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