IMPOSSIBLE ARCHITECTURES / ALIEN STRUCTURES
PHOTOGRAPHY | CREATIVE CONCEPT | PROJECT
Project details
The ‘Impossible architectures’ (also section ‘Alien Structures’) photographs are part of a larger series entitled ‘Impossible Worlds’, started a few years ago, which is a long-term open-ended project structured on three different tiers. The sequence that I’m presenting puts under a hyper-realist intimate scrutiny several architectural images. The mirroring applied to the original images accentuates the inherent dual nature of the subject and creates a new potential space of self-integration, thus giving birth to new impossible architectural disclosures. Therefore, the final images speak not only about the existing structures, but also about me and about your (the viewer’s) perception of both. But beware: I do not attempt to create an architectural Rorschach test, nor do I seek to simply juxtapose interpretational duality to monochromatic reality! The reflected image is, in fact, a new-born architectural space that enriches the world of the imaginary, highlighting the infinite possibilities to dream on. The world of dreams, the most intimate of spaces, becomes a never-ending speculation – perhaps a little Freudian, but nonetheless nourishing. It is not a haze, but a daydream, within which different scenarios may be played-out by the viewer’s imagination.
Project selections
“The lance is mentioned in the Gospel of John (19:31–37), but not the Synoptic Gospels. The gospel states that the Romans planned to break Jesus’ legs, a practice known as crurifragium, which was a method of hastening death during a crucifixion. Just before they did so, they realized that Jesus was already dead and that there was no reason to break his legs. To make sure that he was dead, a Roman soldier (named in extra-Biblical tradition as Longinus) stabbed him in the side.” (Longinus Blade, aka Holy Lance, Lance of Longinus, Spear of Destiny, Holy Spear)
“Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Daedalus tried his wings first, but before trying to escape the island, he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his path of flight. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared into the sky, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which due to the heat melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms, and so Icarus fell into the sea in the area which today bears his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos.” (I c a r u s, in memory of my father M.C.)
The images are not randomly generated. I have incrementally developed a personal technique to identify and to photograph only half of what is to become the new image. Multiple possible combinations are carefully analysed in order to determine the new spatial arrangement and the subsequent redistribution. After all, I am trying to recompose a world where no combination is prohibited. It is a never ending game, where the re-composition of de-composed pieces reclaims a world of infinite freedom, a world in which every architectural disposure is possible. Our mind decomposes and recomposes all the pieces in order to create a specific spatial disposure, one not necessarily of comfort, but certainly of internal coherence. The game of ‘impossible combinations’ (ars combinatoria) with spatial dimensions holds a neuronal infinity of possible various collocations. The new ‘Impossible Worlds’, such as the ‘Alien Structures’, have altered mathematically the reality of the mundane perceptions of the architectural space. Those newly created spaces are ‘alien’ only because their un-built status, not because it would be technically impossible to erect them in a real world.
Project gallery
Unified by a common motif, the series talks, in semiotic terms, about the complex re-integrations of spatial differentiations – through the process of multiple combinatorial methods. The aim is to re-configure architectural dimensions, by modifying the perceptual and the functional self-positioning. Altering our take on reality by (in this case) ever-changing architecture may appear as an escapist scenario. Yet it also accentuates the possibilities of creating something entirely new. Somewhere between the surreal representations and the imaginary manipulations stands a message ready to be heard and, then, to be appropriated.
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