The world that i dream

About

The world that I dream presents a reflection on the nature of architecture in relation to the abstract action of montage – as a method of defining the possibilities open to the architect's gaze – and the role of archives as a design medium.
The exhibition is a collection of different types of images, some untouched, others desecrated, which are transformed into models and give shape to an idea of the world: each architect defines their own vision through a recomposition of the signs and forms they have collected over time. This collection of fragments is stored in the memory of each person. The project is the result of an unconscious montage. Archives play an essential role in developing the work that contributes to the constitution of architecture; on the one hand, they make it possible to preserve the memory, and on the other they contribute to creating a vision.

The exhibition is divided into three rooms, the first of which features Postcards (2010-2022), that is, a series of postcards in which the places depicted take on a key role in defining the montages: some are unaltered and bear witness to buildings that no longer exist, others encounter fragments of architecture and objects that are transformed into a flow in which meanings arise from apparently unrelated things. Postcards lose their status of monumental body and documentary source. This is a way of thinking about time and images together, not as different interpretative palimpsests but as joint ones; the image becomes the centre of a reflection on the time of the project.

The second room hosts Immagini trovate (Found Images), namely montages of photographs taken from books that have no direct connection with architecture, but are the result of an accidental encounter and, once catalogued by theme, contribute to the exploration of places and forms.

The third room hosts What's left of the world (2019-2022) and The hidden memory of images (2021-2022), that is, dialectical images that become models with a serial nature. The juxtaposition of images, no matter how diverse, always produces a transformation, an opening of our gaze. Montage is used as a system for annotating ideas and producing narrative strategies through simple operations such as the multiplication of signs, changes of scale, inversions, grafts, superimpositions and deletions. These operations can be used to ask questions about design that can only later be applied to architecture.

“The world I create when I dream is a world where images meet and become the words of a discourse on architecture”: this is how Luca Galofaro poetically describes his research and working method, which combines representations found in markets, extracts from books and photographs taken while travelling with forms, objects and structures from his personal archive. The images in the exhibition define an operational strategy rather than a theory.