“Continuing dreaming knowing that you are dreaming” while holding on to the “weak thought” in order not to lose the horizon for a meaningful human action; maybe this is the only path we can follow to find Giovanni Battista Piranesi staring at us from his imaginary world. In the threshold of the epistemological split, the mysterious dimension of the world became the only space, where an architect could act poetically. At this point, “how did the true world finally became a fable?” How did Piranes…
Read more“Continuing dreaming knowing that you are dreaming” while holding on to the “weak thought” in order not to lose the horizon for a meaningful human action; maybe this is the only path we can follow to find Giovanni Battista Piranesi staring at us from his imaginary world. In the threshold of the epistemological split, the mysterious dimension of the world became the only space, where an architect could act poetically. At this point, “how did the true world finally became a fable?” How did Piranesi create his “fictionalized experience of reality”2 to open a way for aletheia by opposing the ideal of an objectified truth? How did he communicate with the ancient times within an excess of history? These questions become crucial when we place Piranesi on the edge of an era whose grounds are shifting towards the age of reason. In order to be able to understand Piranesi, we have to interpret, which ideas constituted his reactionary and avant-garde position in his time. Piranesi stands as a dreamer, who was not naïve about the realities of the world. He engaged himself with the “disclosedness of beings”, not to lose himself in them, but rather as Heidegger denotes “such engagement withdraws in the face of beings in order that they might reveal themselves with respect to what and how they are, and in order that presentative correspondence might take its standard from them.”3.
