Altre storie di libri e palazzi

‘Storie di libri e palazzi’ (Stories of books and buildings) is a project born in 2017 through the University Library System with the aim of highlighting the University of Ferrara's commitment to recovering and renovating the city's historical buildings, transforming them into university buildings. Creating new links between the territory, students and the local community.

Inside the buildings are the university libraries, making them containers of the books and knowledge that keep the university community alive. Composite and multiform realities are created, layered in different reading levels. Open archives in which ‘containers’ become ‘content’ and the link between books-libraries-palaces is strengthened. Environments that speak to us in silence, spaces that tell their story with a single glance, holding together the past and the future of the city of Ferrara.

It is in these places that we build our knowledge, ‘carve out’ a piece of knowledge and fix it in our minds as if we were leafing through one big book in which to immerse ourselves totally.

With historical images imbued with evocative power, the exhibition ‘Stories of Books and Palaces’ presents itself as a journey through time and space: each palace reveals its history, each library reveals its secrets and each book becomes a bridge between past and present.

The essence of this exhibition is captured in a single glance through a symbolic image and dynamic graphics that testify to the multi-layered development of the project. The design of the pumpkin flower becomes the spokesperson for the project and emblem of the exhibition. The graphic image creates games of ‘breaking through’, discovery and immersion by exploiting the solids and voids of simple geometric figures combined with the historical image of the pumpkin flower. The seven ‘blocks’ take up the 7 palaces with their typical Ferrara bricks and the 7 libraries with the spines of their books, thus emphasising the link between books-libraries-palaces and making the visitor ‘enter’ a magnificent dimension straddling past, present and future.

In the exhibition design, the panels are held in tension by metal structures, light, dividing the space and creating a suspended environment to explore and learn about. The information is arranged thematically and takes up the dimension of ‘archive’ in a search for the contents collected by the project during more than seven years of activity.

Through visual and interactive games, the themes of unveiling, browsing and building are taken up again, understood as discovery and advancement, growth towards the future.

At the end of the exhibition, a ‘feedback device’ is set up. An interactive wooden structure in which, through the use of simple bricks, those who have visited the exhibition can leave their opinion, helping to collectively ‘build’ the future of the project. The result of the feedback recalls the graphics and thus the concepts contained in the project.