Palaces of Words - The town voice
“Cities, like dreams, are made of hopes and fears” writes Italo Calvino in his book “the invisible towns”. When you look at “palazzi di parole – palaces of words” of Nicolò you cannot avoid thinking to these words and believe that towns, more and more similar the one to the other, if you look at them, listen to them… they answer to your questions. The town voice, this is what this project is concentrating on. Like Wim Wenders angels, we look at the town from an unusual perspective, we reach its heart and listen to a voice, to its thousand voices. A babel of voices: sounds, words, rumors, …whispers, shouts, thoughts and memories. In a simple word, Life, yes, because first of all a town is a vital place, a dynamic place, always changing.
Nicolò has stolen the soul of the town, sometimes by chance, just holding on to its various buildings that belong to different periods, built for different lives but all correlated to each other and nearly melted in one element, all sharing the same nervous and restless rhythm of the urban.
From historical palaces to unknown buildings, the artist’s eyes move from here to there, between streets and lanes, near and far, Milano, Lugano, Como,…
His eyes are not caring about the architectural aspects or celebrity, nor look. In a click, he is capturing life, the life that has been spent and still has to come in these buildings, to hundreds and more stories that have been told among those walls. Nicolo’s buildings are made of men, lived by men. At first sight, these buildings seem all the same, monolithic with no life or beauty, cold and static objects, without virtue… but, let’s leave aside for a while our know-how, forget about the importance of Architecture in history, let’s forget about reasons and research that sometimes are hidden behind the design of these buildings. Let’s look at them from the every-day people’s eyes: high buildings, surrounding and pressing on them. There is no interest for their innovative and elegant shapes, like the Torre Velasca, or basic and useless of a suburb block of flats: they will look at them as not-animated block of buildings, sad big cathedrals built on a modernity project. Nicolo’s eyes have left apart these aspects, crossed-over walls, cement and stones. He has listened to voices. Voices trapped inside but that can witness the life of people that have lived there for days, months, years or for an eternal life.
Nicolò is used to projects that go beyond the boundaries, projects where Art and Literature dialogue together. He has imagined these building like an ultrasound machine to capture the echo of people and with a trick, buildings become alive through words printed on books pages, books printed on the buildings’ period. Buildings voice becomes loud and visible and it shows the town soul. In between picture and painting, “Palazzi di parole, Palaces of Words” provide sight, sound, touch, even smell sensations of familiar but sometimes granted images.
A project based on palaces built years ago but that would like to invite everybody to think about the actual urban spaces, to reflect about the role of Architecture today, a project that seems winking to architects in order to invite them to reflect and think about a more “human” space, more reachable and in connection between users and the surroundings.
This project is not only a visual art-work but it would also like to open and develop discussions among architects and people, through a wide, critic, wise and global reality that surround us.

Technical information:
direct ink-jet print print on collage of pages from antique books pasted on wooden board