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