Montage is the medium

The book by Marta Magagnini recounts how montage becomes a narrative form to be applied in different conditions and for diverse purposes, with a focus on the essential need to continue seeing this specific medium as the basis of the creator’s aesthetic consistency.

Marta Magagnini, <i>PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio</i>, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Marta Magagnini, PIC ArchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Creating pictures in a world made of pictures is no easy task and it is also very hard to write a book on the subject because it requires knowledge of the techniques for handling a single template, the photograph.
This knowledge must be supplemented by an ability to select and organize a large quantity of picture material to produce a work model for experts and non-. Magagnini’s book contains multiple readings from which at least three different paths emerge. Techniques, Narrations and Testimonies – all of which knit together perfectly in a dry and intentionally almost scientific language. 
Marta Magagnini, <i>PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio</i>, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Marta Magagnini, PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Techniques: in Rosalind Krauss’s Under Blue Cup [1], the standard notion of the medium, or technique, is replaced by that of the support and the technical supports to which the author refers are generally borrowed from the forms available to the mass culture (collage is, in fact, based on the fragment of everyday routine that comes in several forms, including some closely linked to the portrayal of architecture). The need for this substitution stemmed from the fluid unity of Postmodernism, which declared obsolete the very concept of the medium as pure technique; therefore, in all these types of montage the common thread used to define an idea is most certainly – for architects and artists alike – architecture in its symbolic form.
Marta Magagnini, <i>PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio</i>, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Marta Magagnini, PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014

Narrations: in this part, Magagnini retraces significant moments in the history of montage, using highly original and carefully chosen artwork. Those were the years when drawing disappeared (it never really disappeared but shifted to a different level and took on another meaning) and photography emerged as a means of mass communication.

The last part is that of testimonies: interviews well orchestrated by the author, who has chosen very diverse people whose practice is paradigmatic of both the art and architectural worlds. More than all other groups, Superstudio wrote the history of montage both technically speaking and in terms of content. The interview with Cristiano Toraldo di Francia contains an excellent passage that visits different registers and passes from the single picture to its constituent parts and the production of that picture. A picture indicates a story that takes shape via the bringing together of texts, drawings and photographs.

Marta Magagnini, <i>PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio</i>, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Marta Magagnini, PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Beniamino Servino sees montage as a theoretical creative form in which text and fragments of historic architecture merge in the memory to become built architecture – with no difference between the reality and its portrayal.
It is no coincidence that the chosen artists are Giacomo Costa and Botto & Bruno, drawn more to the potential of architecture employed as a fragment than to the actual collage form. Giacomo Costa starts from the collage of several buildings and then finds himself working with renderings to conjure up atmospheres in which the architecture is an expression of a changing world. Botto & Bruno assemble fragments of photographs and arrive via ever larger montages to construct immersive urban landscapes, which they use to reinvent the interior.
Marta Magagnini, <i>PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio</i>, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Marta Magagnini, PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Montage becomes a narrative form to be applied in different conditions and for diverse purposes, narrated very well in this book with a focus on the essential need to continue seeing this specific medium as the basis of the creator’s aesthetic consistency.
Marta Magagnini, <i>PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio</i>, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Marta Magagnini, PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Krauss says that art provides a way of learning to better live in the world. It is not about utopian realities but manners of existence or models of action to apply in the existing reality, as demonstrated by this book.
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Note
:
1. Rosalind Krauss, Under Blue Cup, The MIT Press, 2011
Marta Magagnini, <i>PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio</i>, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014
Marta Magagnini, PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa 2014

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