Incomplete Voyage or the Process of Reappropriation of the Fantastic

Abstract

Contemporary society leaves little space to dream  and allows only for a reduced political engagement, with few shared beliefs. We criticise, but we do not act. We protest in mass, but we are individualistic. We advocate for freedom of thought, but we are prisoners of social media and their images: images, images, images popping out everywhere, overwhelming us, suffocating us.

However, representations since antiquity have always had an impact on society, as mirrors and amplifiers of the everyday. They were created to question, describe and re-imagine faiths and situations: wandering tools able to tell a common story, through individual ones. They were not “images for images”, but rather parts of a larger narration expressed through different rituals, inviting a connection with the other. The goal was to see reality with other eyes and to recognise the sur-meaning in it.

On the contrary, today we are faced by a different context: the fantastic - the imaginative, dreamy or creative potential of every object or being - is either rejected or fully embraced as a substitute of the surrounding reality. Therefore, the aim of this text is to investigate how to re-create a balanced connection between reality and the fantastic, architecture and ritual, representation and myth. If performance, seen as a key tool for the expression of collectivity, will be the linking thread of the discourse, montage, thanks to its relationship to time, will be the visual, acoustic and temporal vehicle, transporting us through this α-chronic incomplete voyage.