Represantation and Simulation

As Moretti replied in an article in Quadrivio: «[...] I do not think it has been made clear enough, and most people are naturally far from having the slightest awareness of it, the fact of our very low sensitivity to living according to an external reality. We much prefer to continually create ourselves a fictitious reality, and in it we find drowsiness and peace. [...] In a thousand years, when we too will be counted among those who were ancient, probably our civilization will have passed into history (at least the fictional one) as the civilization of the cinema. And I hardly believe our distant posterity will be able to explain how a multitude of living people would like to gather in a dark place, to celebrate that kind of Mitra ritual that is celebrated every night in our screening rooms.» In this interview granted at the age of 29 Luigi Moretti criticizes, through a provocative and unusual anti-cinematographic dialectic, the incapacity of many - thinking at the architects, the artists and the intellectuals of his years - to place himself outside of reality without creating an unreal one. In my opinion this is a strong architectural criticism of the inability to see the project as an autonomous element, which is valid in itself and which exists beyond its realization, but also an ante litteram rejection of a scenographic construction of the project by images, which excludes the planimetric and volumetric composition from architectural narration, exacerbated in its more mature vision of designing by parameters. Too often the boundary between reality and representation still finds overlaps that are not always healthy, between virtual virtues and artificial realities, leading to invert at an architectural, urban and territorial level, perhaps even irretrievably, the concepts of form and substance. A specific analogy that uses Baudrillard, french philosopher and sociologist - not to describe this phenomenon but usable to understand it - is a fable extracted from “Del rigor en la ciencia” by Jorge Luis Borges. It tells of a great empire that has created a map so detailed that it is as big as the empire itself. The actual map was enlarged and destroyed as the empire itself conquered or lost territories. When the empire collapsed, all that was left was the map. In the interpretation given by Baudrillard it’s on the contrary the map that people lives, the simulation of reality, where the inhabitants of the empire spends their lives making sure that their place in the representation is well circumscribed and detailed by the cartographers, when instead it’s the reality that it’s crumbling around, abandoned to disuse. Baudrillard refers to the precession of the simulacra, referring to the way in which they came to precede the truth: in the rereading of the text of Borges he claims that just as for contemporary society the simulated copy replaced the original object, also the map came to precede the geographical territory, counteracting the relation of the terms in the map-territory concept: «from now on, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of the simulacra - it’s the map that generates the territory and if we were to revive the fairy tale today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map».