Recycled Theory: Dizionario illustrato/Illustrated Dictionary

Recycled Theory is a multidisciplinary dictionary made of entries in form of texts, drawings and quotes, which explore the concept of “recycling” in design cultures and in the theories that nurture them. Usually we recycle things, objects, spaces but more often we return on principles and approaches to rearrange them, put them back into circulation, and override them. The practice of recycling is therefore placed in an area of negotiation between memory and amnesia, it brings out the unexpected self-regeneration potential of what exists, our ability to preserve and reinvent it, even through its partial breakdown. The words here collected (from “amnesia” to “zone”) identify materials, procedures, ambiguities, deviations, and potential nexus of recycling, recording terms that tell the different processes of production and sense of city and landscape after recent socio-economic upheavals and the widening of preservation as the prevalent scenario for the project. Recycled Theory comes out of the collaboration of eleven Italian universities engaged in the research “Re-cycle Italy: New Life Cycles for Architecture and Infrastructure of City and Landscape.”