Drawing… «Ut Signa Temporis»

The poster has been shown at the XXV Conference of the Unione Italiana Disegno (UID), held in Lerici (Italy) in 2003. Aim of the related exhibition was to narrate by original images the personal experience of working in the field of Architectural Drawing. Quite unusual topic for a young researcher (as the Author of this report was at that time) who was preparing himself to became a professor. But quite usual to the founder of the UID, professor Gaspare De Fiore, who has always been deeply interested in the human background of university research and education, and especially in the young students scholars. Therefore, it was challenging to us to look back to the reasons why we decided to spend our lives in the academic world, struggling on one of the most fascinating and at the same time enigmatic disciplines: Drawing. When one is a student, she/he believes that the disciplines are eternal and absolute. Later on, one discovers to be part of a constant transformation, to be, in a way, temporary and relative. To my generation, experiencing the transition from analogue to digital during the university education, this was even more evident. This is the reason of the nostalgic partially Latin motto appearing in the title (in Italy we often use Latin or ancient Greek in our speech) “Drawing...Ut Signa Temporis”, literally “Drawing as Sign of Time”. I thought it would have been an appropriate title to open the poster session, since the poster here published was the first one presented during the poster session of the first seminar of the cycle, devoted to Archival Images Between History and Future. From this point of view, the drawings here presented are like pieces of time juxtaposed on the same ground, like diachronic stages becoming synchronically perceivable. Looking at it at a glance, the poster reminds me the Michel Foucalut’s comment about the Don Quixote adventures, namely when he stops in front of all the signs of the similitude in order to fulfill the promises of the books. In fact, given the connections among ideas, drawings, and real world, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish these categories when we look at our past experience, in this case, at our past drawings. Anyway, the layout is chronologically organized, and times in the poster runs from below to above, covering the first half of the Nineties of the past Century.