nathan
cilona
info
200 plan libre : anatomy of an architectural journal
plan libre 200 : neither building nor demolishing
plan libre 198 : happy medieval time
plan libre 197 : tinies
plan libre 196 : roundabouts
plan libre 195 : disappointment of the form
new fictions for architecture
architecture’s photogenicity at the instagram era
altered memory of space
[coll.] synopsis
juliette picherit, portfolio
atelier d’architecture david huet
places
faces
jars
atlas
Let’s Talk Magic
The exhibition "Atlas. Discours sur la magie" opens a new chapter for the Synopsis Collective here in Brussels. Introduced in the context of the upcoming launch of a post-master's specialization in film and architecture by 2024, the exhibition aims to highlight the undeniable links between these two arts. This two-year European diploma program is intended for graduates from the broad field of architecture and urban planning.
The Synopsis Collective invites you to explore architecture through an illusory, enchanting, and mystical prism in the form of an Atlas of words and images. This exhibition, in collaboration with Roxane Enescu, a professor at ULB, brings together thematic panels that connect the works of students from ULB and ENSAB to create a cartography of magic, architecture, and cinema. The images include frames extracted from films, as well as plans, sections, elevations, photos of models, research sketches, and texts.
Atlas. Talking About Magic revolves around five symbolic themes:
— Appearance/Disappearance
— Mass Effect/Human Wave
— Black Magic
— Mystery/Phantom
— Carousel
These five axes draw on the codes of the seven allegorical declinations of universal knowledge accumulated by humanity, derived from Giulio Camillo's theater, better known as the Memory Theateror World Theater. It is a collective exploration of the productions from the Architecture and Cinema option at ULB, led by Roxane Enescu, and theArchitecture of the Crowd Studio at ENSAB, supervised by Can Onaner and Mathilde Sari, all imagined by the Synopsis Collective. Each of these themes is illustrated by fragments of reflections gleaned through the prism of magic and its mysterious connection with cinema and architecture. The exhibition makes use of written and auditory formats, as well as visuals, including video, models, and drawings.
The most evident spatial response to connect all these fragments of images and writings was the use of tableaux inspired by Aby Warburg's "Mnemosyne Atlas." Envisaging a scenography conceived as a library where images accumulate, reflecting the hidden interiority of humanity, sustains the original idea of the famous Memory Theater. This concept is no longer fixed but continues to be perpetuated. As a result, real and fictional worlds confront, intersect, and interpenetrate, especially through the recto and verso of these moving and suspended atlases, which analogously evoke the question of what is inside and outside the frame—common to magic, cinema, and architecture.
The film medium, the converging point of the exhibited works, is omnipresent, particularly in its fictional and magical dimensions. The magic present in the films and the sequences extracted from them has the power to disturb the viewer's senses, reveal the hidden dimension of a potential fiction called off-screen, and sometimes even animate a static urban or everyday architecture. This inherently magical event remains intangible, ritualized, and mysterious, often based on universal beliefs and myths. Through a play of superimposition, appearance, and disappearance of sequences, the editing reveals the theatricality of architecture and stages the poetry of magic.