radical landscapes documentary traces florence's design scene and the legacy of gruppo 9999

THE RADICAL DESIGN MOVEMENT OF florence in the 1960s

Towards the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the city of Florence served as the epicenter of Italy’s Radical Design, one of the most important avant-garde movements in the history of architecture and design. The city’s Radical scene consisted of pioneering collectives of young architects, most of whom had trained at the University of Florence. Under the names of Archizoom (more here), Superstudio (more here and here), UFO, Gruppo 9999, and Zziggurat, these influential groups experimented with utopian ideas addressing social and political matters of the time, and ultimately proposing radical new ways of living through their manifestoes and conceptual designs.

Offering an insider’s look into the experimental scene that was Florence in the 1960s, ‘Radical Landscapes’ follows director Elettra Fiumi as she embarks on a quest to uncover the multimedia archive she inherited from her late father, Fabrizio Fiumi, after his passing in 2013. In 1968, Fabrizio Fiumi, Giorgio Birelli, Carlo Caldini and Paolo Galli founded Gruppo 9999, one of the least known and yet most important Radical collectives of Florence. The group won MoMA’s ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’ competition in 1972, while a few years back, in 1969, they founded the revolutionary Space Electronic, a multimedia, psychedelic space near the Santa Maria Novella station that served as an architecture school by day, and a disco by night. ‘I couldn’t believe how the 9999 works and radical architecture movement were so unknown except in certain academic circles related to architecture and art and sustainability – I receive requests almost daily for images and references from the archive. To this day, most of the 9999 works have largely been unseen,’ the documentary’s director explains. ‘It’s hard to believe a google images search yields such few results when the archive is so rich. It was a duty I felt to let the world know about this group and hopefully inspire others to adopt a radical approach to understanding and resolving issues we face regarding our environment today.’images: ‘Radical Lanscapes’ film stills unless stated otherwise

all courtesy of Elettra Fiumi and Fiumi Studios

‘RADICAL LANDSCAPES’ — an intimate FILM on gruppo 9999

Premiering on November 13, 2022, Radical Landscapes traces the director’s journey of uncovering and digitizing the multimedia archive of her father, with little knowledge of what he had actually devoted his life to. ‘With the death of my father, Fabrizio Fiumi, I inherited the archives of his radical life that took place before I was born, of which I was unaware,’ Elettra Fiumi says.‘By including layers historical and personal, I wanted to bring back to life that complex and exciting time, and the thinking of these visionary architects while democratizing the discourse around architecture through an intimate, female gaze – mine.’

Within Gruppo 9999, Fabrizio Fiumi experimented with an architectural form capable of merging the potential of electronic media with pop iconography, underground culture and rock music, working towards the establishment of personal economic independence in which it could be applied. Meanwhile, his daughter knew her father as the ‘subtitles guy’, having invented the device that produces the subtitles which ran below the screen on an electrical board. She also knew her father as the founder of the Florence Film Festival, which she would be dragged along to as a small child. Never was she aware of the extent of his legacy and how she would honor it in the future. Fiumi begins the adventure in this documentary, interviewing her family, former group members and more, unearthing historical stories, as well as those closer to home. ‘I spent a long, chaotic and complex time gathering my father’s archive from different places around the world and trying to find all the materials and footage,’ she notes. ‘Then I digitized it. And then I kept finding more stuff. Slowly I started piecing it together and making sense of it. I really didn’t know where I was headed for the whole first part of the filmmaking process. I followed the tracks that I found and allowed my journalistic curiosity and my grief to lead me. A lot was then built in the edit itself. I had tried to write and rewrite the treatment but it only began breathing in the edit.’

Gruppo 9999 was founded in Florence in 1968 by Giorgio Birelli, Carlo Caldini, Fabrizio Fiumi and Paolo Galli

Nearly 10 years in the making, this compilation of archives is presented in a style that reflects Gruppo 9999’s collagistic approach. For that, Fiumi collaborated with the Fossick Project duo, who created animated collages that reflect an internal journey of hers through the 9999 works. Eventually, she also created further animations with Alessandro Santillo and Milly Miljkovic. ‘Inspired by the style of the 9999, this film follows a collagist method: the editing combines weaving together a vast archive, contemporary footage and collage-style animations where I “travel” through the 9999 works. Acoustically, the film is accompanied by 60s and 70s original compositions, and a sound design composed of alternating naturalistic and technological sounds. In this way I hoped to recreate a relationships between memory and radical forward-thinking ideals about the future. To me it felt like the journey of mourning blurred the boundaries of past, present and future; they were merging in a magical-realist atmosphere, arguably a similar approach the Radicals had in thinking about solutions for our future. The layered, collage-style of the film (in both the edit and animations) had the purpose of conveying this vibe.’

Florence skyline