THE PROJECT

DETAILS#

SITE- SPECIFIC PROJECT FOR PARTICIPATORY URBAN REGENERATION

Inspired by the intuition of Emiliano Ciotta

Created and implemented by Luigi Ciotta

Assistant: Pīnar Bekaroglu

‘Poetic support’ by Caterina Moroni

Technical support and video effects: Fabrizio Garnero

Musical accompaniment: Dan Solo

We have all, at least once in our lives, become lost in the clouds, searching for strange shapes and fantastical creatures. This natural activity takes the name of Pareidolia: a subconscious illusion that imposes known forms or profiles (natural or otherwise) onto shapes that have none. It is the instinctive and automatic tendency to find ordered structures and familiar forms in disordered images.

According to the artist William Kentridge, this mechanism is innate; “meaning is always a reconstruction, a projection”. Our minds are inclined to see, to reconstruct, that which is familiar, and the more creative the mind, the more trained it is, the quicker and freer it is in doing this.

But, what is this training that we all perform?

Why not attempt to do exactly this in our everyday lives? In the cracks on an old building, in the marks on the pavement, in old doorways; to bring fantasy and imagination back into the grey of our cities and everyday lives, in the abandoned places, or those that are not cared for by people. Places that are full of history, of diversity and consequence and loaded with enormous potential for richness.

“Cities are a combination of many things: of memory, of desires, of signs of a language. Cities are places of exchange: exchange of goods, words, desires, memories.” I. Calvino – Invisible Cities.