Supersurface by Superstudio UP016
"Supersuperficie" (Supersurface), made by Superstudio, is one of the most original expressions of a design activity elaborated by architects in the form of a film.
Produced for the 1972 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Lanscape, Supersurface was the first of five films planned by Superstudio as a critical reappraisal of the possibility of life without objects.
The story is shaped around the theme of human life. Initial scenes, accompanied by sounds of ancestral drums or fetal heart beats, perhaps muffled by an amniotic fluid, are somehow connected to the end of the film where a kind of hymn to life takes place as a crescendo introducing the final statements: "our life will be the only art."
Multiple narrative layers are offered in this film: the verbal record gives room to a profound story: evocative, never literal. The visual record, rooted in the pictorial identity expressed in the film's storyboard (published in the same year on "Casabella" magazine), tends to freeze images in stable forms. The overlapping of these layers and the contamination with other inner narrations offers the spectator an original palimpsest, rich in inventions, irony, and weighty in meanings.
Produced for the 1972 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Lanscape, Supersurface was the first of five films planned by Superstudio as a critical reappraisal of the possibility of life without objects.
The story is shaped around the theme of human life. Initial scenes, accompanied by sounds of ancestral drums or fetal heart beats, perhaps muffled by an amniotic fluid, are somehow connected to the end of the film where a kind of hymn to life takes place as a crescendo introducing the final statements: "our life will be the only art."
Multiple narrative layers are offered in this film: the verbal record gives room to a profound story: evocative, never literal. The visual record, rooted in the pictorial identity expressed in the film's storyboard (published in the same year on "Casabella" magazine), tends to freeze images in stable forms. The overlapping of these layers and the contamination with other inner narrations offers the spectator an original palimpsest, rich in inventions, irony, and weighty in meanings.