Studio Alice Franchetti

When the ruins of one of the world’s largest ancient cities, referred to as the “desert oasis”, were ransacked, as revealed by a UNESCO report, where the latter mentions “considerable damage in the museum”, including several decapitated statues and shelled sarcophagi. A temple, as well as the triumphal arch, have also disappeared.

But these witnesses of history can be reborn...
“... In recent years, I have noticed one thing: the countries I travel in are home to magnificent treasures. Sometimes known, protected and in the opposite case not listed and sometimes even without archives. There are very few international organizations that do full reconstruction work whether the subject is recent or remnant. This is all the more problematic because sometimes some monuments* disappear, for many different reasons, notably erosion, urban evolution, visitation or because of armed conflicts.

To save them, it is possible to reconstitute them virtually, in order to highlight their exceptional value. This answers a problem: memorization. This makes it possible to keep track, to enrich the collective memory, because unfortunately today and even more in the future the possibility of accessing all these sites will always be more complicated, that testifies of the existence for the future generations. Even if these images will never replace the physical presence of heritage and they are only a ‘complement to the contact of the material’ ...” 

*Here used in a broad sense, this term qualifies any “object” that testifies of the existence, the reality of something that can serve as a testimony of historical and cultural value.

This project offers to discover the city of Geneva by following a route guided by an index of places where the statues that characterize it are placed. The names of the streets being linked to the history of the city and to the people who marked it, the reader thus has access to a whole detailed documentary on the history of Geneva and those who made it famous.

Replica Replicas (Aphrodite | Vénus)
Ancient sculptures, masterpieces, described in the literature are now lost or extremely mutilated, much of it is known to us only by copies, of the Roman period which served as references. A different sense to the original work by being reworked so many times.

2.0 (Appollon, Aphrodite Hermès)
Initially the role of the statue seems to be to locate and to fix on a material and tangible object. The statues of the deities had the function of revealing to men the mysterious, formidable reality of the sacred. Today we can see them during visits to temples open to all, or out of context, in museums. They have little more function than to be seen. If you only look at the shape, digital sculpting seems to be interesting because the software offers tools to push, pull, smooth, grasp, pinch or manipulate a digital object as if it were a real substance. But it breaks all sorts of limits, such as the loss of all physical constraints of gravity, strength, feasibility, size, and integrates the movement, bringing new possibilities. A digital sculpture may very well float in space, be gigantic or tiny, or not have a fixed dimension.

Monumentum is a tourist guide which presents the fifteen most visited monuments in Europe. Their popularity has allowed me to come up with a different visual language than what they are usually associated with. I wanted to showcase how interesting they are, not by showing them as we are used to seeing them, but by isolating/enhancing their characteristic elements. These very different monuments let us travel through different ages and explore a large panel of forms. One visit, 15 monuments, 500 elements, are what my edition is composed of, creating an architectural journey through which the reader can be transported into the past and back.

Villa Savoye is a project which proposes to immerse the visitor in a guided tour in 3D in the famous construction of Le Corbusier. The visitor goes through each part, shedding light on the five aspects of modern architecture which articulate and organize the edition. Le Corbusier published in 1927 “The five points of a new architecture”, he systematically used his architectural ideas in his constructions and the Villa Savoye was the perfect physical demonstration.