Produced by Andrea Branzi during his period of collaboration with Archizoom, this pastel work borrowed many of the themes developed by the Florentine group. Autoritratto called into question culture, forms of architecture and the conditions in which it was practiced in the context of a new post-industrial society. In this piece, Branzi ironically compared heterogeneous representations ranging from Pop illustration (comic strip, consumer objects, etc.)—with many signs referring to architectonic features of the series of “beds” Letti di Sogno, 1967)—to motifs inspired by Islam, among other things. Organized in the form of a triptych, this work displayed neutral but colourful cubic spaces on the right and, on the left, a set of cubes on which objects with no hierarchic connections evolved, with these two parts being connected by a powerfully undulating tape: architecture here was not defined as specific architectonic composition but rather as a system of dynamic relations responding to more particularly affective realities.
