``A
ssembling images as I do in my work does not mean assimilating them to fit them into a logical narrative plot, but juxtaposing single fragments, conserving their multiplicity, partiality and impurities to make their combination or repetition generate an interference with or a reaction to my imagination, opening up new possible relationships and knowledge. Montage thus produces an imagination that is an integral part of knowledge.
Didi-Huberman says that our era is one of lacerated imagination; every day we are surrounded by a mass of images: clichés, stereotypes, repetitive pictures, images already seen that impact each moment and literally suffocate us. It is a world orientated towards viewing taken to extremes, which in the end shows us nothing. All this creates an inurement that makes us consider images not very important from a cognitive standpoint, as mere representations, reproductions of external reality. When heterogeneous archived images are collided with each other, juxtaposed to form a mnestic atlas that avoids any project of sequential order, a new image is produced that takes on a new meaning.
In a certain sense it is the attempt to construct an atlas of one’s own imagination, whose reference point is Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, but with the difference that the images juxtaposed in this Atlas have first been manipulated and personalized through an operation of assimilation.”
Luca Galofaro – An Atlas of Imagination (Damdi Publishers, 2015)
L
uca Galofaro is an architect and professor. Founder of the agencies IaN (1997-2015) and LGSMA (2016-) he has developed an experimental practice for architecture, seen not as a fixed object but as system of ongoing relations and exchanges, as well as open to editorial and curatorial approaches. He holds a Masters in Space Sciences at the International Space University (UHA Huntsville Alabama). He is Associate Professor at the University of Camerino since 2015, and guest professor at Confluence in Lyon, the Bartlett School in London and the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture de Paris. Winner of the Gold medal for Italian architecture in 2006, shortlisted for the Lakov Chernikov prize in 2001, and a finalist in the 2011 Aga Khan Award. He is also a photo-montagist and the author of the book An Atlas of Imagination (Damdi Press, 2015). He is also co-curator, with Abdkelkader Damani, of the first edition of the Biennale of Architecture in Orleans, titled “Walking in Somebody Else’s Dream” (2017).
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