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Symposium / Italian Collage — Architectural Drawings in the Age of Social Media / Kunstraum Innsbruck

12 12th, 2014

Several Italian architects have recently taken up the technique of collage again to present their ideas about architecture. The best-known examples are Carmelo Baglivo, Luca Galofaro and Beniamino Servino. Collage has been one of the favourite techniques in Italian architecture since the nineteen sixties. It enabled radical architects like Superstudio, Archizoom and others to give their bold visions a sense of reality and it allowed Aldo Rossi to show the city as a collection of fragments. The current collagists are new in at least a few ways. First, they can use software like Photoshop to create their images (even if they may use drawings made by hand as well and use them as raw material for the collages as well). Second, they use social media like Facebook and other blogs to post their work, often on a regular basis –even if the originals –as far as one can speak about originals in the digital domain- may be exhibited, published in books and even be for sale. This means ideas can be posted immediately and can get responses from the people who see the images immediately. It also means the work can be shared and quickly reach a larger audience than anyone producing similar work before could have dreamt of, being dependent of print media. Third, in their collages, they cannot only refer to fragments of photographs or drawings in isolation, but they can also refer to the whole history of architectural drawings and collages, resulting in complex plays with references. It is this intellectual wordplay and detournement that the architects, most of them having a practice severely gnawed by the political instability and uncertainty created by the current crisis in Italy, are interested in. These collages are a kind of 2D follies. It is the constant stream of these follies, the sheer quantity of them, and the reactions on them that produces a discourse that architecturaltheory.eu, the chair for architectural theory of the University of Innsbruck, presents in the symposium Italian Collage, Architectural Dawings in the Age of Social Media.

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