A MATTER OF DIMENSIONS

article by Stefano Rolli, journalist

​

​

In 1884, Edwin Abbott Abbott imagined, in his Flatland, the adventures of a two-dimensional character living in a two-dimensional, flat universe. The protagonist, a square, becomes witness to a disruptive event destined to forever change his perception of existence. The irruption of the third dimension—specifically, a sphere—into his flat world represents a subversion of the established, accepted order. The poor square, whose mind opens to the possibility of further dimensions, ends up being regarded as a heretic in his own world.

In 1927, with Metropolis, Fritz Lang gave cinema history a visionary dystopia and an ominous prophecy. Set in a forest of mournful skyscrapers, he portrayed the cruel machinery of a technological despotism. Once again, it is disruptive events—the creation of the robot Maria, the workers' revolt, the attack on the machine that sustains the colossal city—that shake the foundations of the world imagined by the Austrian master.

In her Flatopolis, Isadora Bucciarelli plays with these and other references with extraordinary grace and lightness. Her city, born from the flat surface of the page, rises like a pop-up in the three-dimensional unfolding of her paper maquettes, alongside the characters who inhabit it, offering us glimpses of a world that is bidimensional in essence, yet tridimensional in manifestation. Just as our own flat lives stumble clumsily through the three dimensions of reality, the humanity that dwells in Flatopolis is portrayed by Isadora with a smiling irony worthy of Sempé.