MINIATURA: The Supreme Achievement
Curated by Maria S. Giudici and Davide Sacconi
CAMPO
Rome, Italy
2015      

MINIATURA was a collaborative project between Bruna Canepa and Ciro Miguel from 2011 to 2015.



Feauturing the work of: Alex Maymind, Amid.Cero9, Aristide Antonas, Behemoth, Dogma, Didier Fiuza, Faustino, FORA + Beth Hughes, Map Office, Microcities, Miniatura, Philippe Morel, Raumlabor.

“The Supreme Achievement”, an exhibition born out of the collaboration between the London publisher Black Square Press and the space for architecture CAMPO, will open in Rome on Saturday the 12th of September 2015.

The curators Maria S. Giudici and Davide Sacconi invited 12 international architecture offices to formulate their position on the contemporary city through the elaboration of a narrative text and an evocative image. The contributions have become the briefs for a workshops in which students from several European Universities have been called to build 12 plaster models as devices that from the domestic scale could trigger the urban visions.

The idea of the exhibition and the workshop, together with a publication that will collect the results, originates from the project “The twelve ideal cities” published by Superstudio in 1971. Perfect and dystopian urban mechanisms where any incoherence is eliminated, they challenge the idea that space and bodily presence might not matter anymore in the future, while at the same time they provide an ironic commentary on the architect’s curse; architects have to be projective and optimistic by default, even or maybe especially when civilization seems in fact to have come to an end.

The Superstudio piece was less about imagining the Future than it was about re-imagining Architecture as a form of knowledge and as a platform for thinking rather than mere practice. The format itself – one image and one text for each of the twelve cities –implied a project of an Archetype rather than a pragmatic solution to a problem. In fact, these visions of ‘supreme achievement’ are not answers, but open questions. Sharing this approach the project “The Supreme Achievement” elaborates a reflection and opens a debate on the possible role of Architecture in putting forward ideas for new forms of life and new possibilities for our political imagination beyond the current conventional models. The exhibition and the workshop are the first act of CAMPO, a space to debate, study and celebrate architecture, born in Rome out of the collaboration between Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Luca Galofaro e Davide Sacconi. CAMPO invites researchers, professionals and students to expose projects, experiments and researches that challenge the current understanding of the city, and to collaborate in the investigation of the potential and the limits of architecture as a form of collective production and common knowledge.