AA VV, Superstudio – Migrazioni ITA, 2020

Begun in 1966, Superstudio’s journey led its members to reflect on ways of inhabiting a ‘round and rotating’ world. Superstudio Migrazioni offers a new perspective on the group’s œuvre, described as ‘radical’ by Germano Celant. More than an exhibition catalogue, Superstudio Migrazioni proposes three parallel yet complementary explorations – through texts and interviews, through images and through archives – of the collective journey that pushed architecture to its limits. At first ‘super’ and fundamentally realistic, and adopting consumption and production mechanisms in an ironic and critical manner, Superstudio’s architecture evolved to encompass ‘things, the body, the Earth’, before dissolving all materiality, retaining only a symbolic dimension and blending with life itself. In offering a rich selection of images, works and documents, Superstudio Migrazioni aims at allowing for multiple cross-readings and interpretations of the group’s intellectual, architectural and poetical migrations. The first book gathers critical essays and interviews with three leading architectural figures of the past 50 years who were in close contact with Superstudio; retracing their personal and theoretical careers, these different voices show the extent of the influence of what had nevertheless been a marginal group, and bring to life these ‘journeys into the realm of reason’. The second book proposes a thematic voyage through the work: a rich iconography is presented through a series of notions taken from Superstudio’s vocabulary, revealing – beyond the unified history incarnated in a few quasi-iconic photocollages – the richness of the projects and images produced throughout the group’s active years. The last book presents previously unpublished letters from the archives of Adolfo Natalini. The exchanges between the members of Superstudio and the letters written to leading architectural figures of the second half of the twentieth century, paint a collective autobiography in which, through fragments, architecture and life are seen to coincide more and more.