Transcript
Antonino Cardillo
My first encounter with art was through video games in the 1980s, which taught me not to trust the sensory reality and to try to acquire the ability to modify it through imagination. Initially, I imagined myself as a video game programmer. Then I realised that much of what I found in video games had existed in the reality of the past. And so the desire that had been channelled into video games suddenly found this new possible development in the world of architecture.
The next step was to translate this historical background into a possible architecture for the present.
My attempt is to bring architecture back to a pre-modern dimension, where the architect was not a professional, but a lover of knowledge and philosophy, and through the built space, sedimented a critical stance towards reality. In this sense, architecture can be an artistic phenomenon.
I believe I was driven by the desire, in creating the ‘Houses for No One’ [2007–2011] or ‘Imaginary Houses’, to build an authentic architecture. Thus, the idea of imagining and simulating, both from a digital point of view and with the intention of communicating and disseminating these houses internationally as if they were built, was a cultural act, an artistic act, an act of rebellion against an established order. This idea that works can become significant without an underlying economic apparatus, which corresponds to the idea of commissioning, was almost a scandal. It was a reversal of roles that was not foreseen.
A year after the so-called scandal of the ‘Houses for No One’, I built in Rome the so-called House of Dust [2013], probably my first built work that manages to propose, in a tangible form, the humanistic cultural programme of the ‘Houses for No One’, a real phenomenon of simulated reality.
Now I think that the future could be to physically build these houses and use simulation as an act of hermeneutics, of interpreting reality.