Jingqi Kay Liu

Translated from “Vita, Educazione, Cerimonia, Amore, Morte: cinque storie del Superstudio, 4 [Amore]” by Superstudio; Originally published in “Casabella”, N.377, 1973

Love Letter to Maddalena

The love which had unfolded within him one ordinary morning and had transformed him into a pattern-book of daisies stripped of their petals, sounds of violins and church-bells, moonlit nights, and many other things he found himself possessing, (that love) was sitting with him in front of the typewriter to write his first love letter to Maddalena. But the horror of that blank sheet of paper in front of him hypnotized him as usual, and once again, he felt lost and alone.

Then he tried the old exorcism of breaking the purity of the paper with a letter chosen at random. He wrote “R” and then “O”, and finished the word with “SE”. Then he noticed something strange, because looking at the paper, he found a large red rose with its stalk still caught in the roller. As a test, he wrote “NIGHTINGALES”, and there they were on the shelf holding his accounts; the male immediately began to sing.

The word “PERFUME” dazed him and gave him the courage to write down “LOVE”.

The philosopher who was the first to enter the room was dressed in white and had a love which had been born in his brain, but had not been able to find its way out.

The love of the nun who followed was made of silence and tears, bathing the feet of a wooden crucifix.

The love of the absent-minded scholar was hidden on the only unread page of the millions of books that the elder had studied.

Then came two pale fiancés who kissed only each other’s eyes; they sat down on the sofa in the waiting room and after five minutes were groping in each other’s clothes and had gained some warmth.

A mature couple passed by, indifferently bearing their slow sweaty love; but behind them came two old people, dragging a cold, creaking affection.

The door closed and the house was immediately invaded by:
– a man – a woman – an old man – a panting boy with frantic hands on his own genital;
– two men – two women embracing closely, looking lost;
– a person with an enigmatic expression, covered in excrement;
– a man carrying a dead body, trembling and kissing it on the mouth;
– a very breathless woman masterbating a Great Dane;
– a fat woman with a corset, suspender belt and pink hat who was worried and clutching her adolescent son to her chest;
– a very thin man with a rapt air, pressing a woman’s shoe into his mouth;
– a panting old man with a little girl in his arms, one hand groping under her light dress while she slept;
– a man with a resigned expression hitting himself on the head with a stick carved from the head of a dog;
– a person with a curious face who had watched everything and then sneaked off into a dark corner.

Emptiness and silence returned to the room, but immediately afterwards, a gentleman in old-fashioned clothing came into the circle of light cast by the lamp; he laid the naked, unconscious, blood-stained woman he was carrying down in the armchair in front of the desk and sat on her.

The man writing to Maddalena saw a fat face, divided into squared blocks of stone by the wrinkles of age; recollection of the old print served as an efficacious introduction: “Marquis de Sade”; “Pleasure” An unexpectedly sudden anguish; he quickly tapped the keys “Maddalena” and found her on his lap, softly pressing on his genital. And he explored her: her wide mouth… her small breasts… she was different and perfect; perfect. But she was not the same girl he had taken to the cinema yesterday evening, the same as the girl entering the office now, attacking him with words he had often heard, but which she had never yet pronounced. And, as she had entered, Maddalena left, tearing the others into a thousand pieces.

But the Marquis was still there with his stone face, while the man who was to write to Maddalena made a list of stolen goods (daisy petals, violin notes and bells, rays of moonlight, and other junk).

And when the Marquis signaled with his finger, the man followed him out of the deserted office into the autumn weather. And they met:
– a woman watering geraniums in pots;
– an old woman giving tripe and caresses to stray cats;
– mechanical nurses putting a wounded man on a stretcher;
– a prostitute bargaining with their head in the window of a car and their arse in the air;
– a little boy crying and hanging onto his mother, wanting an ice-cream;
– two boys fighting about sports;
– and many other things you all know about.

And finally they saw the soldiers marching by, with their heads in helmets to protect their brains against thoughts; and it was exciting because they had on all the uniforms of the world and with each gust of the wind, the flag changed nations. Naturally the grandstand was full of kings, generals, and presidents; each full of love for themselves and their followers: the grandstand was evidently the same as the one at the Nuremberg trials, or perhaps one belonging to some government, where it is always love for oneself and one’s followers which continues to condemn oneself when it is another’s.

But it was only when the Marquis caught a passerby by their cardboard nose and pulled it that the man who was to write to Maddalena realized how easy it was to look behind the mask of love that we all wear, that varies from Hitler to Ophelia, but made of the single model that can be bought at the supermarket.

Thus, when he arrived at the end of the parade boulevard, before the mirrored door which opens to the other universe, he politely took off his mask, together with his hat, before entering. He would have liked to write to us describing what he had found there, but not one word in our vocabulary was suitable to explain that world; that (adjectives missing) world in which love has been washed away from everything. And for this he apologizes.

A building in the Jungle

Whoever flew over the boundless jungle, was suddenly introduced to a gray surface with regular outlines, barely permeated by the thick vegetation… Getting lower, one could see a sort of platform lover than the surrounding trees, perhaps composed of asphalt or other fine-grained material, like a floating plaza. Once landed, it revealed the surface as the roof of a large and low building, whose side walls, submerged in greenery, were made of mirrors! It was therefore an enormous modern architecture.

This architecture was an endless parallelepiped of mirrored crystals resting on the ground. Its structures were not visible from the outside. A single opening led to the inside.

Once inside, a second parallelepiped was visible, the sides of which were uniformly twenty meters from the outside: this second structure was completely made of curtains, hanging from high up, and could be penetrated almost at every point.

Pulling aside one of the curtains, a third parallelepiped appeared in the dim light: this was composed of regularly squared and nicely joined stones. Some were engraved, others had bas-relief carved into doors and windows, but all were blind. There were only two real doors, and they opened at the corners.

Once we had penetrated this massive structure, we discovered inside a rough pile of dry mud and reeds: a dark, irregular opening only screened by a mat of rushes opened at a certain distance from where we were.

Pushing aside the mat, on the floor of beaten earth, in almost total darkness, lay a man surround with a few tools; as we approached he opened his eyes and said:

“I am the chief builder, I am the one they call the architect.At first we made a clearing in the forest and we built the steel building with mirror walls, but our reflected image unsettled us and so we retreated inside and built the draped building with curtains.

“But its walls were unseizable, and there was nowhere to lean/rest. So we built the stone building inside with all our craft. It exhausted our strength and left us in awe of its beauty. So we tried to find ourselves through the use of our hands, and inside we built the dome out of humble mud and reeds which we lived in. A tunnel dug into the ground led us outside to the forest from which we got fruits, roots, and small animals. Never once did we looked at the buildings we built.

“Then everyone returned to the forest.

“And now I’m lying down on the ground, at the point where I remembered to be the center of the concentric buildings and I wait. But the builders have escaped into the forest for a long time by now, and I have long awaited the inhabitant the work was destined for. I have lost the memory of him and his name, but he was a powerful man who appreciated beauty.”

We then brought in the love machine. We placed two units on either side of the man lying on the ground, and connected them to the generator. Immediately, the machine went into operation without any visible effect, except a faint luminescence and a very small beam connecting the two parts.

The man dreamed of all architecture again. He dreamed back the buildings he had built and all the others he had lived in, the ones he had seen and the ones he had lovingly measured.

He dreamed again of his love for stone, steel, crystals… he dreamed again of the catalog of oriental satraps written for certain out of fear for death,, but drawn up with. furious love for a life of reason, for a rich and diverse life with all nuances, transparencies, and shines of precisely marble and mirrors.

The alabasters became moonstones, women made of stone and wax who left their hair in the thorny bushes of the hills. The light inside showed the bones, the thin cartilages, the ancient wounds; at the end of the mirrored corridors with multiple secret doors, the nocturnal huntress hiding in the bend suddenly made gestures of calling: but reaching the 90 degree turn she was no longer visible, except in jet another reflection at the end of the other wing. For this the man stopped to engrave the stone, to draw a precise. diagram of the Earth and the seasons, a diagram in which the position of each of us was clearly visible.

He wanted to draw a map for easy orientation by tracing a mandala with a piece of chalk on the asphalt, with a stick df on the gravel, with a shell on the sand, with an iron tip on the stone and colored marbles. He then used mechanical knives for the steel and crystals. Thus he came into fortuitous collisions of his world and the world of others, and he called them love, and these generated other motions, the laws of which he did not understand, but were surely part of the great schemes whose design was hidden from him.

The love machine did not show him such designs: it simply carried his love potential from things to human beings. His desires to make, create, transform, possess, and give shifted from inorganic matters to the innumerable beings with whom he would enter into a relationship. The machine continued to work, showing him in brief moments, lovers, childrens, friends, the wonderful objects with which life was built…

GUIDE TO THE TEMPLE OF LOVE… it stands (the temple) in the center of the city, at the top of the hill on which the city is built; but it is not tall or imposing, it does not dominate or crush houses, rather, the arrangement of its part, their shapes, volumes, profiles are the same as the surrounding city. The tangle of streets and squares transforms seamlessly into the network of passages and courtyards of the temple; the towers correspond to the pinnacles, the domes to the stupas; nothing distinguishes it from the city in the morning mists. But as soon as the sun shines through the fog, while the streets remain gray, the great circle of the temple lights up and explodes in the most phantasmagorical vision of gold, silver, and colors that could never be seen.|

Don’t ask when it was built or by whom; it is as old as the city and yet it is young and reborn every day like the phoenix of myths, and the authors of this miracle are around you; they are the faithful of the temple that you see walking tirelessly through the corridors, stairs, tunnels, colonnades, the bridges thrown up to the most dizzying heights among the myriads of tabernacles, pagodas, spires, bell towers. They are the ones you see around you, busy and swift, with intent and friendly faces only when with their acolytes, the authors of this miracle. It is they, who, generation after generation, over the course of millenia, have worked to build, embellish, modify and replace the old and disused parts with new elements.

Each is intent on their own place of worship, because the temple is the union of innumerable and separate places of worship, each of which is looked after by its own faithful.

The best scholars from all over the world have tried in vain to trace the reliefs of the temple; and this is in fact an impossible thing because the temple is so vast and intricate that no one, not even its oldest visitors, knows more than a small portions of it; and no one has ever been able to say that they had visited it completely.

And this is not a place of study anyway; none of the pilgrims that arrive in uninterrupted streams has come to admire the sculptures and paintings that cover everything; no one pays attention to the decorations of gold and precious stones, the polychrome enamels, the tapestries, the carpets, the silks, the fine textiles, the brocades that protect us from the sun or that which we walk on. Everyone comes only to celebrate their respective rite, the rite of their sect in their own place of worship, outdoors or indoors, in domes and halls, in dazzling light or in dense darkness.

No one is a tourist here; each always knows where their place is and finds it with certainty in the tangle of paths, no one enters the celebrating of a worship that is not their own, no ones lends an ear as they pass, to the murmured or shouted words, to the songs, the sounds, the noises of other people’s rites; because here even the curious too, have their own places worship where the rite offers the best satisfactions.

Each of you then enters your own place of worship; I assure you, it is always the best, the most beautiful of all. And don’t worry about not knowing the others; don’t try to enter, even if there are no guards; don’t ask the faithful for news, they would be astonished, they would get mad, and if they had to answer you, they would do so with face full of shame and tell you things that are not true.

But rest assured however, that in every place of worship there is a stone stairway; the small spiral staircase that opens at the center of the floor and wraps itself in darkness, the staircase that no one looks at or talks about, the unseen staircase where everyone descends.

The stairs have phrases and words inscribed in the stone steps; passage and time would wear them out and they would be replaced with others; here are some:

And passing and turning the story is always that:
Without love there is no step;
Love burns and if one has fun
Love love the story is always the same

Understood that in such torment
Carnal sinners are damned
As reason submit to talent

Here is a lot to do with hate
But even more with love
“O quarrelsome love! Amorous hate.”

Even now when… I cannot see
Anyone without feeling it flowing inside
Of me… outbursts of hatred against the human race,
You in front of me are beautiful,
Passionate, adorable…

And on one of the last steps:

May the curse overtake you children,
May the mother hate you!
Curse the father too.
Damn the house.

The staircase, from which sooner or later you will descend in silence, leads to the inside of the temple, in the large and dark room or cave; all the external architecture, the golds, the colors, as well as the rituals, which you had followed until then, are only the crust of it. This room where silence and ferocious outbursts of shouts alternate, as soon as you arrive, you will immediately know the name of it; it is the Hall of Hate. In the center there is a large basin of still and black water; it is the Lake of Tears, where all the liquids occurring in the rites outside drip from the ceiling.

The hall has no exits; but don’t get to running in circles with the others! I beg you! Try to find the strength to climb the ladder. It’s the only way back into the sun.

Even if you, exhausted from fatigue afterwards, lie trembling near the entrance, even if you shout in vain to those descending, asking them not to go, even if they mock you; know that in the frosty dark water of the lake, death is dreadful.

The citations are in the order of: Salvatore di Giacomo, Canzone; Dante Alighieri, Inferno V, 37-39; William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act I; Giuseppe Mazzini, Letter to Giuditta Sidoli, February 25, 1834; Euripides, Medea.

From: History of Meteorites

(A text found on the ground in the streets of Providence)… interest and curiosity, and combined with the existence of an immense depression in the nearby ground, similar to a crater, it quickly suggested the theory of impact, ie. that the crater itself had been created by the impact of an enormous meteorite. This incident has often been described, but has sufficient interest to merit the attention of our readers. The region consists of an elevated sandy plain, composed primarily of calcareous sandstone in sand color, plastered with remnant red sandstone patches here and there, and with highly siliceous, brittle sandstone underneath. This  crater-shaped depression is 1,000m wide and 200m deep, the original depth partially filled with wind-blown debris from the surrounding plain. The rim of the crater is composed of sandstone and limestone deposits that are overturned, crushed, broken and bent, all surmounted by large blocks, sometimes weighing thousands of tons, out of the same material thrown out of the crater itself. Then there are great amounts of finely crushed silica sand, which obviously came from the sandstone following the shock of an explosion or the impact of a falling body. Interspersed with this, there are also scattered blocks of siliceous pumice, which were apparently born from the fusion of the same sandstone. These facts are so compelling that there have been intensive drilling and excavations in hopes of finding a buried meteorite-monster.

While these images leave no doubt about the extraterrestrial origin of the meteorites, it is only natural that there was initially much skepticism in scientific minds for the popular theories regarding the rocks falling from space. This skepticism is so strong that, as E.F.F. Chladni of Vienna tells us in his Feuer Meteore published in 1819, the samples kept in public museums were hidden or cataloged under false denominations. Only recently, however, on the occasion of the exhibition at the List Art Building (Providence, RI) in April 1972, a complete and plausible explanation was provided on the origin of the crater.

The love machine made people dream, of lots of architecture by Superstudio, transporting them from Italy to America. Here in Coconino, Arizona, the scene of action in Krazy Kat, all the dreams of reason, all the interrupted architecture, all the frustrations of the intellectual profession, and all the illusions of revolutions through architecture condense into a spherical form, frighteningly dense.

This mass, after remaining suspended in the air for a few minutes, approached the Earth with ever increasing speed. The Earth then began to retreat; without necessarily a violent impact, a crater was formed; on the bottom of the crater some geometric forms were shaped, the last heavy remnants of ancient memories. A translucent surface was then formed, underneath which the Euclidean solids broke apart. The surface then began to rise, becoming lighter and lighter, until it produced only illusory solids.

There remained only one meteor crater; in Arizona.

This event took place between the 4th and 6th of April 1972. The previous crater (Plate 7), identical to the current one, closed on the night between the 3rd and 4th, thus putting an end to the skepticism and controversy.

Love, or Self-Realization through Architecture

Whoever set out on the journey that morning, in search of princesses to save, holy grails to find, new countries to discover, souls to salvage, lands to conquer, or in search of paradises lost… to all those who have abandoned their blankets of daily routine and searched for themselves across the magical and heroic attics of creation, the architecture arose suddenly before them, after the first bend in the path. It appeared huge and motionless, filled with years of glory, with dreamlike perfection, with marbles and chrome, with polarized crystals, with angular stones, with dried clay.

Countless geometric forms composed it like an infinite polyhedron, from which organic tensile structures and pneumatic appendages emerged.

Countless libraries found space in its body, golden section and divine proportion were not sufficient to describe it. This was the great beast and the mirror that hunters had created and chased since time immemorial. It was said that whoever ate it would become immortal.

It was also said that only from the mystical union of the subject with its representation would the existence of the subject itself derive. It was therefore a dramatic problem of self-realization, since the hunter needed to create the beast in their image and resemblance (the mirror) to be able to recognize themselves; on the other hand, it was difficult to create an image of themselves without a mirror. Several attempts had been made in the past, through statistical averages and systems of trial and error. Naturally, all the makers of the creature were dead, leaving behind erroneous descriptions of the creative process, as a last hoax, to make the path more difficult for other hunters…

An Environment for Love at First Sight

The love machine positioned on one side of the path lay motionless in the grass. But at the moment a boy and a girl passed in front of It, an almost invisible beam hit the concealed receiver plate on the other side of the path. The boy and the girl fell deeply in love in the grass. This identical destiny happened to all those in various parts of the globe, who found themselves passing under the influence of this machine in different environments…

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REFERENCES

Superstudio. Superstudio Opere : 1966-1978. Edited by Gabriele Mastrigli, 2016.

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