Off Club (Anima)

Work

Antonino Cardillo

It is all part of the banality of its outward aspect that the gold is minted, i.e., shaped into coins, stamped, and valued. Applied psychologically, this is just what Nietzsche refuses to do in his Zarathustra: to give names to the virtues. By being shaped and named, psychic life is broken down into coined and valued units. But this is possible only because it is intrinsically a great variety of things, an accumulation of unintegrated hereditary units. Natural man is not a “self”—he is the mass and a particle in the mass, collective to such a degree that he is not even sure of his own ego. That is why since time immemorial he has needed the transformation mysteries to turn him into something, and to rescue him from the animal collective psyche, which is nothing but a variété. — Carl Gustav Jung

Off Club reunites the cinema of Kubrick and De Palma, Grand Theft Auto IV, Miami Art Deco District, the Escher’s perspectives, Byzantine iconostases, and Japanese folding screens. This work continues the investigation of Primordial Images presenting an ambience that reunites the sensorial plane of tactility with the intuitive, which projects onto reality the psyche of the observer. The space between the elements recalls the pattern of a mandala and the last works of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—the theme of the double and the one divided. The two rooms devoted to hospitality form a raumplan six metres in height. Extending right round, a quadrangular enclosure sixteen metres wide unifies the duplex space framing the base of the Vault of the Golden Shadows. The latter, covering the space within the enclosure, is excavated at the centre by a black apsidal shape. Beneath this centre, a false scale palazzo encloses the contents and functions of the two bars. Constructed of two twin altars 7.22 metres long in black granite, both the bars—mixology on the upper floor and sushi on the lower—counterpoint the opposing sides of the palazzo towards the two rooms. With its double grey façade the palazzo carries out the apotropaic function of giving faces to the space. An iconostasis made from two twin black monoliths with elongated copper arches masks the face of the palazzo towards the road. Through the fissure created by the separation of the monoliths a view of figures is revealed. Arches, rhombuses, triangles and discs seem to evoke archaic rituals. Here, ancient and modern syntaxes find conciliation. Thus, this outline of physical and psychic scapes represents the idea of the architecture as transfiguration of the human.

The logotype of the Off Club, Rome, 2018.