Through the looking glass

After Robin suggested me to watch a movie (2001 a space odyssey) and while I was trying to find out something more subtle about my mind map, I ended up thinking a lot about this scene (even though i was supposed to focus my attention on another one, of course).

Apart from the plot, which is absolutely brilliant, and the music and the environment and so on, this scene really captured my attention.
As far as I am really fascinated by whatever concerns manipulated perception, spatial overturning and intellectual uncertainty I just left the house, looking for something existing which could allow me to really understand the feeling of the UPSIDE DOWN, spatially and mentally.
So, I went to the Saatchi Gallery,  where I found an exhibition which was just waiting for me there.

It was an installation by the british artist Richard Wilson, called 20:50.
It is a site specific oil installation which has been previously created in 1987 for the Matt's Gallery.
It is impressive how its simplicity and singularity is actually the secret of its effectiveness.
He used a very simple material like the sump oil to create a very puzzling feeling within the beholder.
While i was taking pictures i went more and more deeply into the details of it and I realized, while doing so, that I was losing the perception of the space i was in.

If I turn the picture upside down, without having any other details of the room, I cannot really define which is the right side. I love the feeling of intellectual uncertainty it gives to me.
The structure seems to cut into a black plane, whose perfectly reflectivity surface mirrors the architecture of the room, betraying no depth or equality of its own.
He says about this installation:

"I have to go real thing and I'll manipulate it in some way - transform it so it is no longer functions in the way you expect it to. But I need that initial thing from the real world because I 've always been concerned with the way you can alter someone's perception, knock their view of the world off-kilter. And to do that I need to start with something we think we understand."

I think this is definitely impressive.
What is more effective that manipulating real things to create a feeling of uncertainty and uncanny?

I spent there so much time that the girls who were on duty, looking at the people into the gallery, asked me if I wasn't fed up enough with the bad smell of the sump oil.
I read a lot about this artist and i found out that to work on this project he read a novel by Lewis Carroll and he based his own research on this passage:

"But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House!"

With this installation it seems that the artist challenge this passage like : "no, lets' not pretend, let's actually get through".

From this I started drawing down my own interpretation of this part of the novel and I ended up with this sketches.

As long as I've been always fascinated by what concerns the retail world, the way our behaviour is when we are in front of a window and even more on how the retail world is now set up. Are the windows at the moment a way to connect people with the showcase or they are just felt from the customer as a barrier?
Thinking about that I started connecting the surreal part of my research with this drawing and I turned out asking myself: what happen if looking through the looking glass, literally, we could be projected in a very surreal world, where the spatial overturning dominates the space, where all the objects we know have a different meaning, where we can fell free of use our own imagination to lead us to a more passionate critical participation during the act of observing and consequently of purchasing? 
What if the box i drew can enclosed a world of our own?
So that I started researching about conceptual architecture of imaginative city and I discovered this french architect, Yona Friedman. He is more a theoretician rather than a real architect and I took his project calle Ville Spatiale to wide my research. Following some of his drawings about this project, which I personally took a s part of my development. 

 The project was a very anarchitectural idea of a city. It was in fact very conceptual and totally impracticable to be built, but the theory beyond that, was very helpful for me.
He talked about this project as an architecture available for a mobile society.This is why, in the mobile city, the buildings must :• touch the ground over a minimum area•be capable of being dismantled and moved•be alternate as required by the individual occupant.The structure reminds me of a place where to live without thinking about what is just underneath it. A moment of calm, where you are able not to dwell as you usually ahve to do. A kind of bodyscape scenario, in which people can live their live.The "boxes" are thought not to be determined nor determining, but they are the dwelling decided on by the occupant.  

I worked in particular on this drawing and I manipulated it, thinking about the retail world and how it works in term of  functionality.

I ended up with turning it upside down, asking myself, what if the ground in his drawing became a layer in mines? And even more, what if his city, became my box of our own, where to project that unfamiliar reality I was talking before?
I want to use the column as a way to look through the glass, and to actually go through it. 
And then, as long as I totally agree with the fact that  to kick our view of the world off-kilter we have to start from something we think we understand.. then..what is more understandable than our own reality?
So, what if the layer (which was the ground for him) through which someone is looking was a mirror? what if it reflected the real world but it hid another surreal world?