To understand, to make sense, to explain.
And then: to summarize, process, define.
Every moment of every day.
And then, suddenly, a pause: granting ourselves the freedom not to understand.
To make room for imagination.
Browsing through the Codex Seraphinianus is a pause from understanding. A journey through hybrid creatures, bizarre architectures, and impossible forms of botany.
An internationally renowned cult book, the Codex defies every encyclopedic convention, describing—in an indecipherable language—organisms, architectures, and botanical worlds that do not exist. Every page is accompanied by texts and captions written in an asemic script, devoid of semantic meaning yet structured according to precise syntactic rules.
It is a work that has to be experienced through the unburdened gaze of childhood, suspending the need to understand in order to make room for wonder.
The author behind it is Luigi Serafini—artist, architect, writer, and designer.
An architect by compromise, an artist by vocation. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Rome, presenting as his thesis several plates from the iconic work that he would later publish in 1981, featuring more than a thousand drawings created between 1976 and 1978.
An eccentric and sophisticated figure that has spent decades moving freely between art, design, and the imagination, collaborating with cultural institutions and a wide range of organizations while creating projects that constantly challenge the boundaries between function and invention. His approach—both ironic and deeply erudite—transforms every creation into a poetic act capable of unsettling perception and opening new interpretive horizons.
// Photo courtesy of Luigi Serafini
“I would like my alphabet to convey to readers the same feeling children experience when they look at books they dont’ know how to read yet.”
