Dove stanno le immagini perdute. Un progetto di Franco Marescotti a Catania

The contribution, drawing on the tools of representation and redrawing as a device for critical analysis, examines a project by Franco Marescotti carried out in Catania starting from 1950. It is neither an unfinished nor a lost architecture, but a completed project that has been misunderstood through uses that have altered its original meaning, ultimately rendering it effectively invisible in its role as a testimony of Rationalist architecture. The recovery of memory, a theme evoked by Astolfo’s journey to the moon in Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, introduces a question that does not concern loss per se: Orlando’s reason still exists, but elsewhere. On the moon end up the things lost by humans, yet they survive in a suspended condition, awaiting recognition once again. The critical reinterpretation of Marescotti’s project, through the study of archival documents and the analysis of what has been built, is situated within this same condition of distance and should not be understood as a work of reconstruction, but of subtraction. The act of redrawing does not aim to restore the project’s completed image; rather, it reveals the awareness that a gap has emerged between the project and the existence of the work, a gap that is difficult to bridge.