Studio Paradiso draws inspiration from the cinematic changes in Cinema Paradiso (1988). We have explored the role of the cinema environment within a community, a place to gather, sitting amongst strangers, a place for exchange, to argue, and to escape the realities of everyday life.

In 1902, a sudden and unexpected collapse of St. Mark’s Tower in Venice resulted in a scene reminiscent of a quarry site or a city in the aftermath of a war, with piles of rubble scattered across the plaza. The photographic documentation captures this event, depicting the theatrical backdrop of St. Mark’s Square that still surrounds it today. The tower was subsequently reconstructed exactly as it was, thanks to a collective endeavour by the city’s residents. This incident raises the intriguing question: What transpires when architectural structures steeped in collective memory are destroyed?

Our exploration into the future of the cinema as an essential institution within our cities has mediated between the imagined and the real, exploring the junction between film and architecture and image making. Central to this inquiry is the notion of the ‘ruin’, not as a discarded entity, but as a modern relic that pays homage to the past while allowing new interventions to sensitively integrate.

Curated in front of you are a series of projects that are grounded in the ongoing current discourse surrounding the future of cinema, reflecting a deep engagement with Venice’s rich cultural heritage. In a challenging environment marked by concerns such as the integration of AI, labour strikes, the operational expenses of cinemas, pirate content distribution, and the rise of online streaming, the trajectory of cinema’s future is navigating a turbulent period.

From Callum’s Scarpa inspired immersive water projection arts centre that sensitively morphs out of the ruin, to Cieran’s inventive photogrammetry cataloguing of Venice’s historic architectural elements that conceives what happens when Venice eventually floods and is gone forever - a proposal that redefines Venice as a floating archive. Nirjarkumar has reassessed the method of film recording in Venice by creating a series of every changing stage sets that use Venice as a backdrop.

All projects are set in the dramatic city of Venice, Italy - a city steeped in historical invention. The World’s first moving film clip with a stationary camera was filmed on a gondola in 1896 (Panorama du Grand Canal vu d’un bateau). In 1932 it also became the setting for the World’s first film festival - a place to gather, critique and showcase original film from both established and new talents. The city is full of spectacle and drama, layered within dense streets acting as a backdrop of the everyday stage. Experimental processes such as pinhole cameras, projection mapping, moving image cyanotypes, and so on have been explored that respond to the history of photographic image making. The aim is to reappropriate conventions of architectural representation in communicating architectural spatial environments

The studio is defined by its hybrid processes, mediating between analogue and digital techniques to capture, document and interpret the design process from early fieldworks to the iterative methods of resolving a design.