The Encyclopedic Palace is made up of wood, plastic, metal, hair combs and other parts of modeling kits Imagined on a scale of 1: 200, the Encyclopedic Palace was designed to be seven hundred meters high, it should have had 136 floors and occupy 16 blocks of downtown Washington DC, including the National Mall. The project by Marino Auriti (an American nationalized Italian artist) was never realized and the model donated on his death in 1980 to the American Folk Art Museum where it is still preserved today.
The Encyclopedic Palace is a sort of reverse Babel where all human knowledge is gathered.
Massimiliano Gioni, director of the 2013 Venice Biennale of Art, uses this symbol as a title and as a catalytic device for the collection of contemporary and past arts that go to build the Giardini and Arsenale exhibition.
The idea is to collect not only what is defined art, but also to add human creative productions outside the system, such as art brut, Jung’s red book and Aleister Crowley’s drawings, to seek the illusion of a impossible cataloging towards the creation of an infinite archive based on difference.
These collected and edited photos are intended as a blurred memory about this thought, the result of a stealthy visit to the exhibition in Venice.
Pictures on the wall
