Copycat. Identity and difference in material culture

[Music]

so

[Music]

i think our age is obsessed by

the notion of originality and uniqueness

but i would like to show you how

employing our net

natural tendency to copy we are in a way

all copycats

we can make beautiful things and things

with great identity

i think the notion of identity in the

past

was tied to the idea of belonging to a

group

you shared values you share manners and

habits

you share ways of dressing or eating so

identity was belonging but

somehow in a modern age we introduced a

different idea

the idea that to be to have identity

means

to be original something like i’m not

like everybody else like

the song of the kings from the 67.

today we generated this word influencer

the word itself tells that you are more

you have more identity as much a number

of people you reach and as much your

image gets retransmitted

fedex and ferrania in a way this

narcissistic

image which is it’s an interesting

phenomenon but somehow is not

like in the past it’s almost a country

but i think this obsession is used today

also

in a paradoxical way by great companies

now everybody tells you

think different think out of the box be

original be yourself

and the idea to buying a

shoe a globalized product and be

yourself is

in a way funny

the new pornographers my favorite rock

group made the

record was named with mess romantic are

we in a mass romantic age in a way

romanticism

stated the individual but today

thousands of girls would like to be like

avril lavigne all over the world so

this is a rage everybody wants to be

unique but somehow

this repetition shows that we’re not

unique at all

these are a group of photographers and

stylists who go around the cities of

europe

you know rotterdam milano pick up people

they bring them to the studio and they

take picture of them

so the names are very funny volunteers

cappuccino girls pokemon so on so the

12th chinozuki

of each of us is nick at least have 12

of

saucies even casuality like these people

leaving their

jacket out or shirt

somehow show the paradoxical state of

our society

going to the vespa to my polytechnic i

teach there

i look around and i see houses in one of

these houses even my grandmother used to

live but in a way the facades on the

interface between

the individuality of people dwelling

there and

the the the phenomenon of the city in a

way a city something which has to

survive to people

but also to be the backdrop of

everybody’s life

so in a way repetition which can be

boring these

buildings have a familiar would say is

also what makes the city

we could not conceive a city made out of

totally singular buildings

this mechanism of repetition goes

through a very important phenomenon

which is called

gossip you know we we use the word

gossip in a negative way but in a way

there was dan sperber he’s scientists he

was talking about

contagious ideas and the epidemiology of

representations

like figures or recipes would

contaminate

and in this voyage you start to have

variation i don’t know who invented the

keep calm and carry on

many but of course it would be very rich

but how many variation of it we could

count

the also sometimes generate a continuous

modification

like a metamorphosis during barbarian

times

the barbarians used to copy roman coins

but then the copy of the copy of the

copy somehow

lost the original icon maybe the

scissors head

or a carriage and became an abstract

figure so repetition been also been

changed

can we make a history of what we could

call material culture

like a history of evolution you know to

see how objects change in time in a sort

of collective fashion

but we have to remember that evolution

is non-linear

it’s not a linear but

say mistake is fundamental in biology

many dead branches 99 of the animals who

lived on this

earth have that now so to get there you

need a lot of

fail and near misses

i just took a picture of my desk table

before coming here

and i picked up all the study models we

did

for a competition for an office building

this is all the things we used to work

and then i did the fun thing i took on

my sketches and i put them in some kind

of

tree-like evolutionary line and of

course

the survival the fitness the the model

is the final model we gave to the

competition

in 2012 there was a b alex position in

venice was called common ground

i love this idea of common ground and to

stress

the idea that we share some kind of

culture this is what permits

communication i did an installation

very quick one half of it was done by my

private collection

i’m an almost a serial

collector of things i went to the

national museum and get some

series of insects i showed these boxes

but also showed this

chapati rolling pills in from rajasthan

use them to make the bread the chapati

bread and each village have a slight

color variation of it

my model submarines even the history of

technique is a history of

elaborating one shape what we know as an

airplane is in a ways

by trial and misses monuments

as some kind of collective culture

souvenir monuments in this case

so i showed these things in big

cup boards like it would be a museum and

inside the other side look like an

italian piazza all the buildings will

look a little bit different but a little

bit the same

finally i just want to spot of a case

many years ago i had the luck to win a

competition to do a big industrial area

in venice it was called the jungas

factory i did the whole master plan on

the venice

but one of the building got really

famous and

published all over the world it was a

simple house made of plaster

was a contemporary house and in a way

what we were trying to do it was to do

something which

looked contemporary not imitation but

something if you squint your eye you

could see

beyond it any building in the judeka we

didn’t

fit in the right to do just some kind of

one statement

i think venice is a collective artifact

did we try to do picturesque did we die

to do mondrian i don’t know yet

but somehow finally this motive i used

which was really related to a

reinterpretation

of the white wind of cornish of venice

it was spread out contagiously and

this is paris even in padova i took it

from the train

all these are buildings all over europe

we somehow picked up this motive of the

white cornish and the regular windows

in i went to austria some time ago and

they say oh these are the

zookey windows they call them suki

windows

but there’s always um an original animal

like the horse is beginning with the

little

projector somehow this ancestor

the white windows are not mine i copied

them from this building this is building

from the sixty done by gabeta is

actually in piedmont so

something which is considered mine is

not mine at all but sometimes it worked

in my situation

it was very refer so i went up to pick

this phrase of paul valeri my favorite

author who says

nothing more original nothing more

yourself than feeding yourself with

others

but you have to digest them the lion is

made out of a simulated ship

a lion made out of sheep

um everybody’s talking be different be

original

think your ideas bit out of the box but

there’s one author i love it’s called

dukla tostada

he wrote a fantastic essay called

variations on the theme on the crux of

creativity

he says instead of always jumping here

and there to apply

a small variation on something you know

and to follow it with consistency can

get to incredible

scientific and artistic discoveries

variation on the theme

so when you do something which is

somehow

good and in a way has a strong image is

repeated this

totally unexpectedly that was a building

in venice it got repeated over and over

again by painters or something so we

need shapes we need forms

forms are something we need to dialogue

among each other

so let’s make forms which are related to

a place

but somehow they can be used in everyday

communication the idea of architectures

to be

the love backroad of our daily life and

of course the survival of the fitness

thank you very much

you