Scripts for a new world: Film storyboards by Alessandro Poli in the CCA

This exhibition represents the CCA’s first dedicated presentation of the Alessandro Poli fonds. Donated to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) by Poli in 2011 and 2016 and digitized by the CCA. To accompany the exhibition, the CCA will be releasing a publication that will bring together the scripts, storyboards, and collages that Alessandro Poli and Superstudio used to produce and film Supersuperficie [Supersurface] (1971–1972).

 
Alessandro Poli, in ‘Manifesto’ declaring the need for film and new forms of representing architecture, 1972.

The CCA presents Scripts for a new world: Film storyboards by Alessandro Poli. Curated by CCA Chief Curator Giovanna Borasi, the exhibition explores how different preparatory elements of film—images, storyboards, scripts, and audio—generated a new language for architecture in the work of Italian architect, designer, and artist Alessandro Poli. 
 
On display in the CCA’s Octagonal gallery are storyboard and collage elements from several of Poli’s projects, offering insights into the use of film as a design tool, and contributing to ongoing discussions on how to narrate ideas about architecture in an increasingly visual and image-dependent culture.  
 
Works include Poli’s master’s thesis, Comune di Modena: Concorso di idee per un parco urbano intitolato alla resistenza [Municipality of Modena: Ideas Competition for an Urban Park Dedicated to the Resistance] (1969–1970), Breve racconto di architettura [A Brief Tale of Architecture] (1969–1970), and the two main film projects produced during his time with Superstudio, Architettura interplanetaria [Interplanetary Architecture] (1969–1971) and Supersuperficie [Supersurface] (1971–1972).  
 
Alongside a growth in decentralized, experimental, and underground cinema at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, many groups operating from within the field of architecture, such as Superstudio, Studio 9999, and Ant Farm, explored the short film as a medium to expand architecture discourse, embed their projects with bold reflections and projections of society, and communicate with a broader audience through references to popular culture. 
 
Scripts for a new world shows visitors to the CCA how the moving image was used to visualize radical interpretations of everyday life and future trajectories of architecture taken to their extremes—visions that more traditional, rigid, or static architectural tools could not achieve.  
 
This exhibition represents the CCA’s first dedicated presentation of the Alessandro Poli fonds. Donated to the CCA by Poli in 2011 and 2016 and digitized by the CCA, a large number of works from the fonds have been made accessible on our website. The fonds documents Poli's work as an architect and designer, produced between the early 1960s and the mid-1990s, and contains materials related to projects that he created while studying architecture, in the context of his collaboration with Superstudio, as well as his personal projects.  
 
To accompany the exhibition, the CCA will be releasing a publication that will bring together the scripts, storyboards, and collages that Alessandro Poli and Superstudio used to produce and film Supersuperficie [Supersurface] (1971–1972).  
 
The related exhibition, Utopie Radicali: Florence 1966–1976, which features objects from the Alessandro Poli fonds at the CCA and presents films by Superstudio remains on view at the CCA until 7 October. Utopie Radicali addresses the idea of utopia as a tool for social critique, by bringing together the projects and archives of Florentine protagonists Archizoom, Remo Buti, 9999, Gianni Pettena, Superstudio, UFO, and Zziggurat, whose radical works are on view together for the first time in North America.